i MERER es rc ase ND Rt ih mi arnt a ae : 5 ost OME Le ii, AURA, St ig ee ee P ’ = * A) he COM AB 4° tela . ; A ° & ys — ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Books by LEWIS R. FREEMAN IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES Down THE COLUMBIA Down THE YELLOWSTONE ‘THe Cortorapo RIvER Down THE GRAND CANYON ON THE RooF OF THE ROCKIES Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff TOP OF CASTLEGUARD FALLS, MT. LYELL IN DISTANCE ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES THE GREAT COLUMBIA ICEFIELD OF THE CANADIAN ROCKIES By LEWIS R. FREEMAN NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1925 is iavhally as Botbale os een are pled “ \ Pea iy Ae | ‘ Y 2 TH the ed fe ih Fel Gof ch Nee’ he A Copyrran, 1925, F ‘By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Ino. 4 ot sh To BYRON HARMON WHO, THROUGH HIS PHOTOGRAPHS, HAS GIVEN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES TO THE WORLD ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author desires to thank the Editor of the National Geographic Magazine for permission to re- print portions of an article which originally appeared in that magazine. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE fees AND. AND THE OUTPIT .. °°. 38. Oe a Pee taeing Pp THE Bow .. 2.0 2 ee 20 Pie mheinp THE SCENES OF SCENICS ©. .- . . « ‘40 ivemtGow LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN. . °. 7. © 68 MeeeCGRING WViUD AND FLOOD... << «4... « 89 Srimriate GAME. AT CASTLEGUARD . .s 2). 4s ee 118 hee e VLOTHeR OF RIVERS «©... 9s, «8 ww «6 I4d Miietcwer TO THe ARCTIC BASIN. . . +.» «)'» 168 Peeiowm THE SUNWAPTA <..° 2. . . « « ~ 4/190 ee AND DowN THE ATHABASKA .. . «. .--. 218 XI Back THROUGH THE SNoWS OF BANFF... . 237 [ix] ILLUSTRATIONS Top of Castleguard Falls, Mt. Lyell in distance Frontispiece FACING PAGE Harmon and his moving picture camera on Fortress Lake . 16 Baptie and Freeman sunning the carrier pigeons. . . . 17 Mee teemear epee at nicht 6. 26 ke a A ae. 32 Mmneeaeretrattory horse... ee 3 “Buster” riding a swimming pack horse. . . alo asl hie fe A deer, following the horses into Bow Camp, took Re ae Bretnelorcasion to ifispect the radio... 2. - 2 0. 3 39 Giving “Buster” a dose of radio-casted jazz. . . . . 48: | Buster riding a pack to save his sore fect . . . . . 49 euerusta alg. . 2... ich cece ici mae Cae ane Writing up radio notes at Bow Lake Cat Me aes ut eee Bow Lake Camp with Bow Glacier on sky line. . . . 64 SEO ee ke ek ele ee Oe eG Crow’s Foot Glacier, looking across foot of Bow Take eng er Harmon mourns over the fragments of the radio “‘broad- Gener oven oucking pack horse’. 6) we oe ee Harmon coming out of a deep ford of the Saskatchewan. . 80 Deep swimming ford at the forks of the Saskatchewan. . 81 Pack train just entering an sa oad sha channel of the Saskatchewan .. OO North and South Twins (et) a Mt. Columbia fee Athabaska . . ea he Mt. Lyell (11,495 Pee ne Ca ae FE Rea 8G Resting pack horses, exhausted from fording, on the flats of Bea i ke hy I A RS ere Le [x1] ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Where a thousand per second feet of water issues from a mountainside This three hundred foot falls, with a constant volume of possibly 1,000 feet per second, issues from a cave in the Jiao mountainside ee a. Fording Alexandra on foot to recover pack horses 36 Setting up radio with aérial to tepee pole . Siren Avoiding a crevasse on the climb to Mt. Castleguard . 144 Party on summit of Castleguard (10,096 feet) . . 145 Wrangler Bob Baptie doing his stuff on a cliff of Castle- guard, 2,000 feet above Columbia Icefield . Packing radio on dog sled . ae Rough going across shallow crevasses on Saskatchewan Glacier Passing side glaciers while He eraae the eh of Saskatche- wan Glacier : Mt. Saskatchewan (10,964 Hee on Divide t to Bets of Saskatchewan Glacier . : White water in the box canyon of Ae fork of Saskatchewan “Soapy” Smith and Freeman listening in with radio set up on a stranded iceberg . : A baking powder tin and a coffee can as loud speaker whined . 146 - 147 158 » 359 :) {HO 161 176 forth the early evening news . ee Wy Midway of the Athabaska Glacier . <2 192 Top of Falls of the Sunwapta 08 A rough, rocky ford of the Sunwapta . . 208 Mount Athabaska from head of Sunwapta . . 209 Looking up the Chaba valley to Continental Divide . Qa2 Black Monk and Chaba Peak from Athabaska . . 298 Mountain above junction of Chaba and Athabaska . 220 Gorge below Athabaska Falls . ae i I Our camp at timber line under Mt. Aaa 5 eae. [ x11 | ILLUSTRATIONS FACING pie for the first clash between eee and New or 7a : When the sun first at eer on Mt. Columbia : The snowy wall of Fortress Lake . . . . Following Looking down to west ieee aver end of Fortress 2 . . Following Mt. Columbia (12,294 feet) shedding its hie mantle at the PAGE Lee oe ak 234 234 end of eight days . . 235 Maligne Lake : . 240 Camp near head of Maligne aks : ~ 24t Maligne Lake. View from west shore . ee Above narrows of Maligne Lake . ESAs Setting up tepee at foot of Maligne Lake . . 248 In deep snow on the Poboktan . 249 A landscape of snow and ice. ‘The horses were brought through miles of these drifts . ; Looking toward the Brazeau from Jonas Pass . Looking down valley of Jonas Creek to Sunwapta from Jonas Poboktan Divide ee Descending from pass to upper Jonas Creek . Heavy going on the climb to Cascade Pass He eo Climbing up to White Rabbit Pass . . . . Following In the snows of the Ram Creek . . . .. . Following The amphitheatre-like massif of Mt. Coleman, with Pinto Lake in foreground . ie =, ea Cerca. [ x11i | min S2 - 253 . 256 s 257 pe2bs 264 264 . 265 as oe pe ny nt v) ‘ et 5 i , o j v ‘ i ‘ i . i wr } 1 t AT ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Bi ke NE Bee Aue > a ta bet iJ ; ut. y ANS? \ Le 5 “es Rset: q J ‘ 4 ¥, : ‘ ; 4 ' 5 ‘ j ‘ f ‘ ‘ ' ‘ ‘ « . Py = SB 1 + ' * m { f oa é \ ‘ j ! { i ‘ 4% ‘ On the Roof of the Rockies CHAPTER I THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT IT is a strange fact that one of the first regions of the Canadian Rockies to be visited by a white ex- plorer was also one of the last to be scientifically ex- plored and comprehensively photographed. ‘This is the land of tall peaks and glacier choked valleys about the head of the Athabaska, where is found what may fairly be rated as the most striking Alpine scenery of the Western Hemisphere. David Thompson, the eminent astronomer-explorer of the Northwest Company, who was later to run the Astors so close a race for the establishment of the first fur-trading post on the Pacific coast of what is now Oregon, crossed the continental divide during the first decade of the nineteenth century by following the Whirlpool branch of the Athabaska to its head and descending to the Big Bend of the Columbia by a stream he named the Portage River and which is now called the Wood. The trail thus blazed by Thompson later became the main transcontinental [1] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES route of the Hudson’s Bay traders between the great Canadian plains and their posts on the upper and lower Columbia. The waters of “The Achilles of Rivers,” swift and turbulent but still navigable for well handled bateaux, were available for the voy- ageurs to run or to breast for the thousand miles or more below Boat Encampment at the northern apex of the Big Bend. Thus it chanced that a thin but fairly steady stream of travel flowed back and forth across the con- tinental divide at the head of the Athabaska during the half century or more that the remainder of the extensive area covered by the Canadian Rockies was rarely visited by white men. It was doubtless for this reason that the narrow zone of mountains im- mediately under the eye of the traveller was elevated to a prominence somewhat beyond its due. Ex- plorers and pioneers of all time have been wont to stress the wonders of what they have discovered or seen and to discount those of the regions beyond their ken. Conservative geographer that he usually was, Da- vid Thompson estimated the height of the two peaks flanking Athabaska Pass to north and south as 18,000 feet. This was arrived at by figuring the summit of the pass as 11,000 feet according to the boiling point [2] THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT of water, and the tops of the peaks as 7,000 feet above the pass. David Douglas, the Scotch botanist who in 1827 named the two peaks in question Mount Brown and Mount Hooker, respectively, perpetuated Thompson’s error as to height, and furthermore char- acterized them as the two highest peaks yet known on the continent of North America. Travellers by the old Hudson’s Bay trail, unduly impressed by the twin sentinels of Athabaska Pass after their long traverses of the level plains, kept alive the early over- estimates of height. School geographies studied by many people now living listed Mount Brown and Mount Hooker as the highest peaks in North America. As a matter of fact, of course, neither peak is greatly in excess of the 11,000 feet of Thomp- son’s original estimate of the altitude of Athabaska Pass. ‘There must be several hundred higher peaks on the continent, and two or three with summits nearly 10,000 feet in excess of the altitudes of Brown and Hooker. Intent almost solely on finding the lowest passes and the easiest routes of travel the early traders and trappers must have been almost if not quite ignorant of the existence, but a few miles to the south, of what has since been proven to be the most extensive ice- field on the continent outside of the arctic and sub- [3] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES arctic regions of the far north. ‘They were under the very drip of the eaves of this great continental ice-shed when they tried to establish a new route to the Columbia by the Chaba branch of the Athabaska and the silver gorge of beautiful Fortress Lake which sits on the divide and drains both ways. When they failed here to find a better pass than that by the historic “Punchbowl,” at the head of the Whirlpool, where the Hudson’s Bay factors were wont to ren- dezvous and transact the business of the East and the West in lurid week-long carousals, the glittering ice-caps gleaming green against the skyline to the south must have told them that there was no use venturing farther toward the heads of the two main forks of the Athabaska. With lines of lofty peaks whose heads were rarely clear of crowns of clinging clouds, and with every mountain valley pouring down its frigid finger of glacier from a mighty mother icefield far above, they did not need to ex- plore further to know that here was a barrier more formidable than any they had encountered to the northward. ‘They were well advised to seek no far- ther in this direction. With the complete topo- graphical data of the present day no better route could be found for the traveller by foot and by boat between Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific than that [4] THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT blazed by the early trappers and traders. And, moreover, not to this day has a practicable way ever been found from the western drainage of the Colum- bia Icefield to the Columbia River, rumbling in its cliff-walled gorge six to seven thousand feet below. The later and more extended explorations of the latter half of the nineteenth century avoided the Columbia Icefield region for the same reason as had those of the trappers and traders—passes were sought for, not barriers. Railways needed lower passes and easier approaches than had footmen and pack-trains, while a cliffy gorge like that of the upper Columbia where it loops round the Big Bend was an obstacle rather than a help. For these reasons the surveyors of the transcontinental lines found that the most favourable natural routes lay far away from the lofty ice-capped plateau where three of the greatest rivers of the north took their rise. So the Canadian Pacific blasted its way through the Rockies and Selkirks from eighty to a hundred miles south of the Colum- bia Icefield, while the Grand Trunk—later the Canadian National—found a lower and easier route as far to the north. The careful studies for neither line added little if any knowledge of the still un- trodden heights of the cold ice-locked terra incognita between. [5] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES On account of the difficulties and dangers at- tendant upon travelling with pack-trail in regions scarred by torrential mountain streams and exposed to the threat of slides of snow and rock, with swamps and stretches of treacherous glacial mud in the val- leys, the first trails opened up in the Canadian Rockies for the benefit of the hunter and the camper were confined to the safer and more readily attain- able regions near the railways. Mountain climbers, seeking for a vantage from which to attack the un- scaled heights of the continental divide, were forced to cut their own trails through the standing and fallen timber and to scramble over rocks and slides as best they could above the line of vegetation. Much or all of such a trail might never be used again. Keen and trained observers for the most part, these courageous and indefatigable Alpinists added more to the knowledge of the high Canadian Rockies during the first two decades of the present century than accrued from organized scientific ex- ploration. Their work was fragmentary and unco- ordinated, however, and it was not until the late Interprovincial Survey completed its labours along the continental divide between Alberta and British Columbia that definite and dependable data of this [6] THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT hitherto almost unknown region finally became available. Among many valuable geographical and topo- graphical facts revealed by the work of the Inter- provincial Survey, perhaps nothing was received, even by those who knew the Canadian Rockies, with so much surprise and interest as the statement that the Columbia Icefield, formerly not known by name to one in a hundred thousand, had an area in excess of 150 square miles. Perhaps of even greater ap- peal to the imagination was the revelation of the hitherto little appreciated fact that drainage from this single icefield flowed to three major oceans— that it was almost certainly the only instance in the world where such great dispersion of water from a common source occurred. The Columbia Icefield may be roughly likened to a stockily built octopus, with the main mer de glace forming the body and the creeping, down-crawling glaciers the tenacles. Completely surrounded by peaks varying in height from 10,000 to over 12,000 feet, the icefield itself is comparatively smooth and level, many square miles of its centre, indeed, being not more rolling than an undulating plain. The average elevation, exclusive of the tentacles of glacier [7] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES which extend down not far from the 6,000-foot con- tour, is about 8,500 feet above sea-level. Its great- est elevation is a hummock of 8,884 feet somewhat north of its centre. Here, at a point not clearly defined to the eye but probably of very small area, occurs the remarkable three-way split of the con- tinental drainage. Where the tip inclines westerly, the water runs by the Bush to the Columbia and thence to the Pacific. ‘The meltage from the north- erly slope may run to either of the main branches of the Athabaska, and so on to the Great Slave Lake and down the Mackenzie to the Arctic. The east and south slopes drain to separate branches of the Saskatchewan which, uniting twenty-five miles be- low, ultimately mingle with the brine of the Atlantic in Hudson’s Bay. Striking scenically, unique topographically, and barely explored, the Columbia Icefield has few rivals in the world to-day in its attractions not only for the alpinist but the lover of the out-of-doors as well. The present article is a plain workaday ac- count of the first attempt to make a comprehensive collection of photographs—moving and still—of this wild and wonderful region. I shall hardly need to add that all of the best of the story will have to be told by the pictures. [3] THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT Even from the days when the carrying and opera- tion of the cumbersome wet-plate outfits presented almost prohibitive problems of transport, the camera has played a prominent and increasingly important part in passing on to the older world the record of a new found land. The explorer photographs as he goes, but, handicapped by haste and the limitations of transport in a wilderness, almost always hurriedly and taking things as they come. The surveyor, when his time comes, works more carefully but only in the narrowly restricted field bounded by topog- raphy and perhaps geology. The last to come but the longest to stay is the artist—the nature photogra- pher. He, like the settler who follows Kipling’s “Explorer,” “remains to occupy.” Unlike the explorer or the surveyor, the nature photographer cannot block out a region on the map and say, “When I have covered this area my work is complete.” He can cover all of Nature’s subjects but never reach the end of her moods. And the recording of moods—the savagery of the mountain torrent which grinds down and engulfs the tongue of forest that blocks its way; the perversity of the peak that hides its head in a veil of cloud—is his most subtle vehicle of expression. A life-span is all too short for the artist who would [9] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES picture, either with brush or camera, a land or a race. Curtis has given the best of many decades to pho- tographing the passing Indian of the Northwest, as has Carl Moon to his record of those of the South- west. The magnificent photographic record of Yellowstone Park, started fifty years ago by F. Jay Haynes, is being added to to-day by his son Jack. Byron Harmon’s successful expedition to photo- graph the Columbia Icefield last summer and fall is the crowning achievement of twenty years spent picturing the Canadian Rockies, but it does not mark the end of the work. Long familiar with Byron Harmon’s fine studies of the Canadian Rockies, my first personal meeting with him was late in the summer of 1920. This was at a camp on the iceberg-battered shores of that in- comparable mountain gem, the Lake of the Hanging Glacier, where I had journeyed by pack-train pre- liminary to pushing off on a boating voyage which was to carry me practically the whole length of the Columbia. In my log of that voyage I find this meeting recorded in the following entry: “Descending to the timber-line meadow where the horses had been left, we found Byron Harmon had brought up his outfit and pitched camp midway of an enchanting vista framed in green-black pines and [10] THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT golden larch, with a wonderful background for ‘camp-shots’ both up and down the valley. There he was going to make his base, he said, until he found just the light that was needed to set off the Lake of the Hanging Glacier. Then he hoped to get at least one or two negatives that would do something approaching justice to so inspiring a subject. And there, working and waiting patiently through an almost unbroken succession of storms that raged in the high Selkirks for many days, he held on until he got what he wanted. It was in that quiet, patient, persistent way that he had been photographing the mountains of the Canadian West for many years, and it will be just in that way that he will continue until he shall have attained somewhere near to the high goal he has set for his life-work—a complete photo- graphic record of the Rockies and Selkirks. Itisa privilege to have met an artist who works with so fine a spirit, who has set himself so high an ideal.” Something of his work—what he had done and what he still hoped to do—Harmon told me in the forty-eight hours we were snowbound together in the first storm of the early closing winter. ‘That was his sixteenth year in the Canadian mountains, he said, and in this time he made winter and summer photographs of most of the outstanding peaks, glaciers and valleys of the Selkirks and Rockies. In four years more he hoped to have photographed [11] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES them all, and then, in the light of what he had learned, he would start in and do them all over again —try to do them better. It was on this occasion that I first heard of the Columbia Icefield. Harmon had never seen it him- self, but had heard enough of it from mountain climbers who had made ascents within sight of it to rate the region as probably the finest scenically in all the Rockies. Because it was remote and difficult to reach, he was saving it for the last—the summer of his twentieth year of photographing in the Rockies. With a properly equipped expedition, and by taking plenty of time, he hoped to be able to cover all of region along the continental divide where he would not have hitherto worked with his cameras. Early in the spring of 1924 Harmon wrote to tell me that he had managed to maintain his photogra- phic schedule during the preceding three years, and that there now remained only the Columbia Icefield region to picture to complete his original program for the Rockies. This he hoped to do during the coming summer and fall. Preliminary organization of the expedition was already under way, and he was writing to ask me to come along and help make the moving picture film. With a jaunt of my own already planned, which contemplated driving a [t23 te THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT small motorboat from Chicago to New York by way of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, some re- arrangement of schedules was necessary to make both trips possible. Ultimately, by hard and steady push- ing through the stormiest early summer the Great Lakes have known in many years, I was able to dock in New York in time to swing back to Canada and arrive at Banff by the rsth of August. The pack-train was already assembled at a camp on the Bow near Lake Louise, and there we joined it the following day. Roughly speaking, the route laid out in advance called for following the Bow River to the lake and glacier of the same name at the continental divide, thence paralleling the divide as closely as topography would permit until the Columbia Icefield was reached at the head of Castleguard Valley. After a month of work on or near the icefield, including the crossing of one spur of it with the pack-train and the circling round to the head of the Athabaska, under Mount Columbia, on its northern side, winter clothes and supplies would be picked up at Jasper and the return journey of two hundred miles to Banff made by the best available route through the early snows. It was expected that from ten to twelve weeks would be necessary to complete this itinerary. Enforced bid ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES waits for favourable picture weather and the fact that nothing worthy of the name of trail would be available for more than inconsiderable sections was responsible for allowing what may seem like an un- due amount of time to cover a total distance of not much over 500 miles. Two features of the proposed itinerary as ex- plained before departure impressed me—so far as my own experience of pack-train travel went, that is —as verging closely upon the impossible. These were the plan to take the horses across the icefield and the expectation of travelling for two or three weeks of the return journey through a region of high elevation, where not only the passes, but many of the valleys as well, would be deep in snow. As to the icefield traverse, I was told that such a crossing had been safely made the previous summer by the pack-train of a mountain climbing party and that there was therefore no reason to believe it could not be done again, especially as one of our packers had been with the pioneer outfit. As for the long snow journey, Harmon thought the rigours of it worth facing for the fact that neither moving pictures nor stills had been previously made of such a winter pas- sage over the high Rockies. It would probably be attended with some losses, and it was quite possible [14] THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT we would have to turn back or follow one of the easterly valleys out to the plains; but, with all of the horses habituated to pawing for grass on the winter ranges, the chance was worth taking. With every reason to expect that the trip both going and returning—the former on account of high water and ice, and the latter on account of heavy snows—would prove one of the most severe ever attempted by a pack-train in the Canadian Rockies, great care had been taken that the outfit, both as to personnel, stock and equipment, should be the very best that could be assembled. With years of per- sonal acquaintance among the guides and packers of the Rockies, Harmon had picked the three men best suited to the special needs of the expedition. ‘These were informed in advance of the plans and itinerary, and warned that the picture work would inevitably be responsible for delays, difficulties and discomforts not usually encountered on the regular hunting and camping trips. ‘They were all mountain men of long experience, and one of them, La Casse, was well acquainted with the region to be traversed as far as the Columbia Icefield and on to the Athabaska Gla- cier and Wilcox Pass. The horses, picked long in advance, had been kept off the trail all summer to conserve their strength for [15] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES the arduous and punishing work ahead. This was a most fortunate circumstance, for the long weeks of semi-starvations in the snows of the early winter, with endless hours of desperate floundering in the deep snows of the high passes, demanded all their stored up stamina to bring them through. The photographic outfit was complete in every respect. Besides the moving-picture camera, with its varied assortment of lenses, Harmon and I had each two still cameras. ‘There was 8,000 feet of moving-picture film, with as much roll and cut film for the other cameras as there was any possible chance of using. The moving-picture film and my own roll films were carried in sealed tins. Har- mon’s huge reserve of cut films, by some oversight, was sent in ordinary wrappings, a fact which was responsible for much anxiety in the days of mud and high water. The only real weakness in the outfit was its lack of water-tight boxes and bags. The pack-boxes in which the moving-picture camera and its accessories were catried furnished adequate protection from the blows of rocks and trees but would not exclude water. Neither would any of the grub-boxes nor the sackings of the food supplies. As a consequence, when we were shortly confronted by unexpectedly se- [16] Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff HARMON AND HIS MOVING PICTURE CAMERA ON FORTRESS LAKE Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff BAPTIE AND FREEMAN SUNNING THE CARRIER PIGEONS THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT vere high water, we lost more supplies in two days than the recent Geological Survey expedition lost in its three months’ voyage through the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Even at that, however, we were never seriously handicapped by a shortage either of food or photographic supplies. With luxuries cut to the bone as a consequence of the fact that no replenishment of supplies would be possible inside of six or eight weeks, our only real frills were the radio and its satellites, the carrier pigeons and the typewriter. The little portable Ra- diola was my own idea, born of the memory of the real entertainment the Grand Canyon party had had from a similar outfit a year previously. After get- ting the best technical advice available on the possi- bilities and limitations of radio under the conditions we could expect to encounter, J had bought the set in New York and brought it on to Banff. Here we had a pack-box hastily built around the little black case and the block of batteries connected up for us by the local electrician. The carrier pigeons were Harmon’s idea. He had been breeding homers at Banff for a year or two but had never had a chance to try them out in the mountains. The present opportunity was too good to be missed. Besides, there was always the chance [17] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES that we would be glad of means of getting out word by air in the event communication along the surface of the earth became impracticable. The birds would also prove a useful medium for reporting on radio conditions, several powerful stations having promised to make special efforts to reach us in the event the Rockies area did not prove entirely “dead,” as there had been some reason to believe. Neither Harmon nor myself knew any more about carrier pigeon technique than we did of that of ra- dio. About all we could learn locally was from an old children’s bird book, which informed that the door of the cote should be of valve-like construction, permitting the ingress of the returning bird but not the egress. Also that the boxes in which the pigeons were carried should be provided with holes large enough to admit plenty of air but not so large as to allow the birds to escape before their time. Both of these admonitions seemed quite reasonable. Less convincing was the instruction that the message should be written on waterproof oiled paper and wrapped securely to one of the bird’s tail feathers. As the only line I had on this particular point was the somewhat hazy memory of the picture on a child- hood valentine of a dove with a very plump packet dangling from its neck, I was somewhat diffident [18] THE LAND AND THE OUTFIT about disputing the practicability of the tail-feather plan. A self-constituted local pigeon expert told us a number of other esoteric practices to follow, but as the most probable of these had to do with taking along a fragment of the home roost for the bird to smell before being launched on its return flight, we did not give them serious consideration. We did lay in a stock of oiled paper, however, on the theory that it might better resist the disintegra- tion of possible fogs or rains. Fortunately we tried it out before starting, and so learned that even the softest pencil point would skid along on the polished surface without leaving the vestige of a mark. And that was why my little folding Corona was requis- itioned to fill the breach at the last moment. A sharply struck key left an impression on the tough, smooth paper which resisted blurring even under the hard rubbing of a moist finger-tip. [19] CHAPTER II BUMPING UP THE BOW DRIVING over from Banff to Lake Louise railway station toward noonday of August 16th, Harmon and I found our camp in the willows by the Bow occupied only a dozen hungry pack-horses tethered among piles of hastily dumped gear. Evidently a cog of a wheel of our well-oiled plans had slipped. What the trouble was transpired an hour later when “Soapy” Smith, owner of the outfit and head-packer, rode in to announce, in language more picturesque than polite, that two of his horses were missing and that he feared they were back-tracking it to their natives ranges in the eastern foothills. Rob, the wrangler, and “Ulus,” the cook, were trying to trail the fugitives, but unless they came back within the hour a start that day was out of the question. Har- mon, cheerily philosophical, replied that it would suit him just as well to get under way in the morning and suggested a drive up the mountain to Lake Louise to fill in the interval. An irate packer telling the world and a consider- [20] BUMPING UP THE BOW able portion of the adjacent solar system just what he thinks of the ancestry of his strayed cayuses is not exactly at his best, from a polite and refined stand- point, that is. And yet my first impression of our head-packer was unmixedly favourable. Spectacled and with the long drooping moustaches of a moving picture sheriff, one of his friends had described old ‘“‘Soapy” to me as a cross between Theodore Roosevelt and a bull walrus. It was my instinctive feeling that the man who was to guide our material destinies for the next three months combined many of the best elements of both of these virile prototypes that in- clined me instantly in his favor. ‘Too, I liked the technique of his profanity—words winged with fire but flowing with the easy, effortless inevitability of the spinning of the turbine of an ocean liner. Free natural swearing meant a well driven, well treated pack-train. One of Nature’s own swearers is also one of Nature’s own gentlemen. That truth had been driven home to me through years of experience. [ have never known a packer who swore freely and naturally to beat a horse cruelly. Yes, I took to old “Soapy” Smith at once, even though his name had been borrowed bodily from a notorious gambler and confidence man who had won what was pretty nearly my last dollar on the ‘“‘pea-and-walnut” trick in [21] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Skagway the week before he was shot by a Klondiker from whom he had lifted a cool ten thousand. It was nearly dark before Rob and “Ulus,” tired but undispirited after their bootless search, straggled back into camp. This again proved good stuff. A man who can return with a smile after twelve hours spent in trying to pick up the tracks of strayed horses is only a little lower than the angels. Rob Baptie was a typical Canadian Rockies wran- gler. lLithe, slender, quick on his feet and with a fine bridle hand, he already had made a name for himself in the local round-ups. The horse was his alpha and omega, the mainspring of his existence, the shimmer on the wings of his dreams. He could ride right down the line of the string of a passing trail outfit, call every animal by name, and tell you just what caused the rope burn on the off hind fet- lock of the little flea-bitten roan straggling in the rear. He could no more keep his eyes from roving over a fine bit of horseflesh than a Broadway “Johnny” can prevent his optics from pricking a dot- ted line to the ankles of a passing chorus girl. All of which went to prove that Rob, like “‘Soapy,” was of the kind that could get a lot out of a pack-train without mistreating it. Ulysses La Casse, commonly called “The Frog” [22] BUMPING UP THE BOW because he was of French-Canadian parentage, was the all-round man of the party. Popularly credited with being the best camp-cook in the Canadian Rockies, and also quite competent as a packer and wrangler as well as a guide, hunter and climber, “Ulus” was fitted to “pinch-hit” in emergency in any department of the game. He was also the only man in the party with previous firsthand knowledge of the Columbia Icefield, having been to and across the eastern side of it the year before with the Tor- rington mountain-climbing expedition. With time hanging on our hands that evening after an early supper at the little hotel near the station the occasion seemed opportune for a preliminary try-out of the radio. In spite of the discouraging pro- nouncements of experts in Chicago, New York and Montreal, who had declared that the region of the Canadian Rockies was almost certainly a “dead” area, I had high hopes of what we were going to do with that shiny little black box o’ tricks. Nor was I given pause by the fact that neither myself nor any- one else in the party knew much more about radio than we did of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. What was the use of knowing anything about ite Had not our party of comparative novices of the Grand Canyon Survey expedition given the first [23] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES definite answer to the popularly and even technically accepted theory that radio could not be received in a deep sheer-walled gorge? And now we would confound the experts again by demonstrating that the eastern wall of the Rockies did not present an in- superable barrier to the passage of the winged eth- ereal wave. ‘To be sure my relations with the radio set carried through the Grand Canyon had been con- fined to stowing the stout yellow box containing it in the forward compartment of my boat and doing my best to keep it from being dumped out into a rapid. But I had watched to see how the ether was coaxed into giving up its secrets and felt quite confident that I could become a perfectly good coaxer myself now that I had a set of my own. All of which showed a fine resolute Crusader’s spirit—and not very much of anything else. The ears at our head-phones might have been cocked into the abysmal void for all the response my spirited jiggering of dials conjured from the unsympathetic ether. Some of the reasons for this became apparent in the morning when we took down the aerial and restowed the set in its pack-box. Then even my un- practised eye discovered something over half a dozen little things that were wrong, with possibly an equal number of similar imposers of silence overlooked. [24] BUMPING UP THE BOW A “lead” run direct to “ground” after being con- nected to the aerial by a hitch similar to the one Baptie would have used in securing a roped steer was one of the least of the difficulties. And that illustrates the kind of radio experts we were to begin with. As there was too much risk of losing more animals by turning the pack-horses out to forage, the whole bunch was tied up for the night with the only bale of hay procurable distributed in pitifully inadequate handfuls among the fourteen of them. They were very hungry and gaunt in the morning, for which reason “‘Soapy” hastened our departure in order to get them out to a good grass camp as early in the day as possible. The missing animals were replaced by two badly trail-worn cayuses from a pack outfit be- longing to Bill Potts, “Soapy’s” partner, which had just come in from the Yoho. Saddle-galled and weary, the recruits were far below the standard of the picked and carefully conditioned stock making up the rest of the outfit. The addition of the radio and carrier pigeons, with their accessories, which “Soapy” had not been expecting, together with a couple of extra cases of photographic supplies Harmon had added at the last minute, swelled the loads to a volume which [25] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES really demanded the increase of our pack-train by two or three head. With no further animals of the sturdy stock necessary for the rough work in prospect available at Lake Louise, “‘Soapy” philosophically decided to divide the extra baggage among the horses on hand and let Nature take her own course in reducing it to proper proportions. I, innocently, supposed that the cryptic remark had reference to the inroads our ravenous appetites would make upon the grub supply. As the sequel proved, however, our trail-wise old mountaineer had more in mind what happens to overly bulky packs in traversing a land of muskeg and fallen timber. Of all known methods of transport that by pack- horse or pack-mule is beyond comparison the rough- est and most destructive. Man-back, dog-sled, elephant, camel, boat, auto truck or aerial tramway are as nothing in their power to do harm. The crushing of lash-ropes and the jolting even along an open trail are punishing beyond description. When, in addition, the pack-train is headed into un- cut timber, dead-falls, bogs and boulders, the destruc- tive elements are multiplied many times over. Into close-growing timber as soon as we turned north from the railway line, the first nine miles up the swampy flats of the Bow River were a fitting’ [26] BUMPING UP THE BOW initiation for the stern work ahead. One of the first packs to be knocked under a horse’s heels by collid- ing with the limb of a half fallen tree originally con- sisted of cases of jam and baking powder, with the insulated wire for the radio aerial riding between. The tangled antenne materials were the only things to preserve their identity so as to be at all recogniz- able after the terrible mauling under new-shod hoofs, but the preserve-smeared and powder-dusted loops were still in a condition to lend point to old “Soapy’s’ wholly atrocious attempt at a joke. “Tf that geesly radio don’t ‘jam’ again when she’s set up,” he drawled, “this anointing ought to qualify her for broadcasting some right snappy baking receeps.”’ Outbreaks like that, however much deserving of condemnation in civilization, serve a distinct and important purpose during pack trouble in the wil- derness by offering an outlet for pent up internal wrath which might otherwise result in violence. One begins by condoning, then encouraging, and is lucky if he does not end by embracing the habit himself. Between mud and devious windings among dead- falls, our progress that first day was painfully slow. Now a horse was bogged to its belly; now a pack [27] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES jammed tight between two close-growing trees while its bearer struggled on through; now, with all signs of a trail gone, the whole train would scatter among the timber. We were six hours making nine miles, and with everyone so busy all the way finding strayed horses and scattered packs that the ever-heightening western wall of the Rockies, with its shimmering fingers of glacial ice clawing for precarious holds above the valley of the Bow, unfolded its brilliant panorama almost unnoticed. Making camp in a drizzling rain, we took stock of the first day’s attrition. With stoutly boxed and sacked stuff salvage had been almost complete. Most of the losses were suffered by things like the baking powder and dehydrated vegetables, especially where the packs had gone to pieces in mud or water. Wet baking powder was, of course, gone forever, but in the case of dampened dried fruit and vege- tables the result had been to increase volume far out of proportion to the actual loss. Nature had taken her course, to be sure, but, far from acting the way ‘‘Soapy” anticipated, had probably increased the volume if not the weight of his food supplies by five or ten per cent. This meant that the horses would be packed heavier than ever for a few more days. But “Soapy’s” hour was yet to come. [28] BUMPING UP THE BOW Finding it no longer possible to continue up the half flooded flats of the Bow the following morning, the horses were dragged and shoved for five hun- dred feet up the steep eastern wall of the valley to where a narrow trail had been blazed many years before. It was a desperately hard scramble for over-packed animals and far from soft work for men. Every few feet hair-poised boulders, left by the slide whose wake we followed, had to be rolled aside to give footing for the scrambling horses. Turning a rock over and propping it up to prevent its rolling down the fifty-degree slope onto a pack- train strung out below is an operation that requires both care and judgment, to say nothing of strength. By keeping very much in open order and out of a direct line below where active road work was in progress, we managed to stay clear of the paths of the hunks of rock which went adrift and headed a little avalanche of their own to the valley. We had all too much of that same sort of mountain- side work in loose rock with the pack-train before the trip was over, but, speaking personally, I was never able to arouse any enthusiasm for it. With each one of the four floundering feet of sixteen horses (not to mention those of five men and two dogs) a potential starter of a moving mountainside, the [29] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES feeling engendered is far from that one of com- fortable placidity that comes with the reassuring clasp of the rope on the rim of a hundred-foot crevasse. The trail which we had laboured so hard to gain proved to be the almost obliterated remains of what had been only a wretched track at the best. It was blocked in many places by fallen timber, which had to be cut away whenever presenting too high a barrier for the horses to scramble across. Con- gratulating ourselves on the fact that the well drained mountainside would at least give better footing than the bottomless muskeg, we started worrying the train along through the prostrate tree trunks as best we could. We had made about a mile when an innocuous- looking patch of moisture where a limpid springlet dribbled out of the mountainside proved that our anticipations as to the continued solidity of footing were somewhat premature. La Casse, on foot, was out in advance of the train, leading by his halter a wiry little buckskin called “The Rat.” Because of his sure-footedness, ‘“The Rat” had been given the honourable and highly responsible task of carry- ing the pigeon box. The latter, a frail packing case of corrugated pasteboard, was lashed so as to [30] BUMPING UP THE BOW ride high up on top of what was already a bulky pack of bed rolls. We figured it was worth the trouble it Was giving to manceuvre clear of overhanging limbs to have the box in as lofty a vantage as possible in case “The Rat” had to swim at a ford or became deeply bogged. Now this was soundly enough reasoned out, but held good only so long as “The Rat” remained right side up. When that shifty ex-Indian cayuse found the trail under him suddenly resolving into a bottom- less patch of soft mud and tried to get out of it by rolling, the unfortunate pigeons were placed in just about the position of the Hindu fanatic who casts himself under the wheels of the Car of Juggernaut. Nothing less than the quick-witted cook’s catlike leap and flying tackle saved the flimsy box and con- tents from being rolled to a pancake under the weight of the floundering “Rat” and his heavy pack. The birds were brought free with hardly more than an upsetting of their water-can, but the case of their late bearer was more serious. ‘The Rat” had continued wallowing until his head was folded back under his body like that of an unhatched chicken. Then, with all four legs sticking up straight in the air, he gave up the fight and began resignedly to strangle. Rob, the wrangler, had already thrown a [31] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES hitch over the forelegs and started pulling down the trail when “Soapy,” dashing onto the scene from above, lassooed the hind legs and set his mount pull- ing in the opposite direction. It was decidedly rough on “The Rat” in a sense, this Spanish Inquisi- tion treatment, but in the end it proved his salvation. Pulling himself together before he was completely pulled apart, he kicked free from “Soapy’s” hitch and, turning a complete somersault, landed on his feet and came bounding along in the slithering wake of Rob. “The Rat” was a tough little brute, and where an ordinary horse could hardly have been less than drawn and quartered by so terrific an experience, he showed almost no effects of it for a while. Later it became evident that there must have been some injury to his back, for he was never able to raise his rear hoofs more than a foot from the ground when trying to kick. Yet even this trouble, what- ever it was, never affected his usefulness as a pack- horse. He continued to bear the heaviest of loads even through the deep snows of the last weeks of the trip. Tall, slender extremely dense timber screened all but evanescent glimpses of a grey-green sheet of water widening across the valley floor below. ‘This [32] Photo by L. R. Freeman FLASHLIGHT OF TEPEE AT NIGHT AM Te Photo by L. R. Freeman SHOEING A REFRACTORY HORSE BUMPING UP THE BOW was Hector Lake, named for the physician and surgeon with the Palliser expedition, which made the first scientific exploration of the passes of the Canadian Rockies in 1858. It is fed by a stream from the Hector Glacier, which extends down from the summit of the Waputik Mountains, as the main chain of the Rockies is called in this region. It drains to the Bow, which, at high waters, covers the low level valley flats to the south and east with a lake of its own. Passing out of the heavy timber, a half mile among the chaos of piled rocks and up-ended tree trunks where the snow slides of a thousand centuries had left their accumulated scourings at the foot of the mountain, we crossed the boulder-choked channel of Mosquito Creek and descended again to the flats of the Bow. In spite of several fordings of the deep, swift river, the going here was the best we had enjoyed since leaving Lake Louise. This was due principally to the fact that, with the valley floor sloping at a sharper declivity, more water had been drained out of the clinging blue-grey glacial silt with which it was paved. First and last, glacial silt was the most annoying scourge we encountered on the whole journey. This main by-product of the grinding of the mills [33] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES of the ice makes the muddiest mud, as well as the dustiest dust, with which I have ever had personal contact. Like the Mills of the Gods in the poem, those of the glaciers, though they grind but slowly, ‘yet they grind exceedingly small.” The dust is so impalpable that it will filter through the closest woven canvas; the mud, at its worst, offers no resis- tance whatever to the downward passage of the foot or the body of horse or man. Once into it, one goes right on to bedrock, unless he has help, or is so fortunate as to encounter some extraneous body like the trunk of a tree. Our packers claimed that glacial silt had one use. It was a wonderful abrasive—had no equal, in fact, for putting on strops for sharpening razors. Not having shaved during the trip, I had no chance to test the pestilential paste on razors. As to its abrasive effect on tempers, however, I can testify from a full heart. Following the winding ribbon of the Bow until mountain meadows, gay with flowers, gave place to the narrow and precipitous canyon which drains the lake above, we were finally forced to ascend a series of sloping benches to the north for another miserable stage in bogs and fallen timber. Climb- ing slowly but steadily, we skirted the attenuated [34] BUMPING UP THE BOW finger of the lower lake, passed the swift-flowing narrows above, and came out at the end of the afternoon upon the firm pebble-paved beach loop- ing in the easterly arm of the upper or main Bow Lake. The scene, especially as it burst upon us after the terribly wearing struggle with an all but ex- hausted pack-train in the black inferno of burned timber and mud-holes below, was of an unearthly loveliness. To our left was the weird Crowsfoot Glacier, clutching with icy talons the precipitous slopes of towering Bow Peak to keep from falling into the foam-white rapids of the narrows below. To our right, a long gently sloping wedge of meadow, dark green and brown and mottled with the shadows of low-lying bushes and clumps of snow-stunted pines, led up to the broad notch of Bow Pass, through which could be seen the pinnacles of the snowy peaks across the Saskatchewan floating, sun- sharpened, against the blue haze beyond. Ahead, across a milky-jade lake surface gently ruffled by the evening breeze, was a wall of ice and rock cul- minating in the solid mass of Bow Glacier, which reared its bottle-green snout above a grey boulder- fan streaked with glittering runlets of tumbling water. [35] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Two great waterfalls, flanking the face of the glacier to left and right, showed perpendicular shafts of gleaming white, round and solid, like the marble pillars supporting the arch of a Grecian temple. The slanting afternoon sunlight formed concentric circles of rainbows in the mist-whorls rising from the foot of the twin cataracts, before striking through to prick with opalescent gleams the dancing wavelets of the lake below. It was a pity that the day’s travel could not have been brought to an end then and there, for taking to the mud and the timber again was a sad anti- climax after the sudden unfolding of that inspiring vision. But a camp site in the northern Rockies demands not only a fairly level and comparatively dry place for the tents, but also good grazing for the horses within reasonable distance. With none of these essentials available where we were, there was nothing to do but push on until they were found. The fact that we had already been eight hours on the road, where four or five was all a pack-train ought to be required to endure of such travel, had nothing to do with the situation. The mountain side sloping to the east end of the lake proved to be honey-combed with bubbling springs, clear and beautiful to look upon but po- [36] BUMPING UP THE BOW tential morasses for the weary horses. At the end of a quarter of a mile, with half of the animals down and all of them near the end of their strength, we gave up the fight with the mud and dragged them, one at a time, down to the lake. There was no beach for the next mile, but with the bottom solid and the water not over ten to twenty inches deep, it was possible to make slow but steady progress. Splashing and floundering along over slippery rocks, the leaking mountain side was skirted, only to find the lake bottom becoming soft and soggy where the little valley ran back to the summit of Bow Pass. What had looked like a pretty meadow a mile away turned out to be brushy muskeg, with a narrow steep-banked stream winding back and forth across it like the wake of a wounded snake. With several of the horses ready to quit every time they bogged down, we were nearly an hour wallowing our way across the last half mile. That behind us, we pushed through a forest of fine old spruce to a protected and beautiful camp-site a couple of hundred yards back from the north side of the lake, with Bow Glacier, rosy pink in the sun- set glow, reared against the southwestern skyline. Rain in the night, turning to snow for an hour or two after dawn, was followed by a day too lower- [37] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES ing and overcast to make work in the picture line practicable. Snow on the 20th of August was a significant reminder of how near winter stalks in the northern Rockies, even in midsummer. String- ing the radio in the afternoon, with the aerial be- tween two lofty pines, we were awarded by vigorous wails from the ether which gave promise of better things once there was time to make a careful set-up. We had learned enough to reassure us on two im- portant points: that this section of the Rockies was not in any sense a “dead” area, and that the terrific banging it had received had not seriously impaired the usefulness of our little receiving set. Quite our most interesting radio reception of the day, however, had nothing to do with etheral mes- sages. It came about through the fact that, during the forenoon, salt had been thrown for the horses on the identical patch of grass where the radio Was set up later in the day. Twice or thrice in the course of the afternoon a bunch of the horses — straggled down from the meadow above for another grateful lick of salinity. The last time they were accompanied by two splendid whitetail does, the first deer we had seen. Taking our cameras and backing off unobtrusively into the timber, Harmon and I left the salt-lick, [38] aSYOH MOVd ONINWIMS V ONIGM (,aaLsnd,, fuvg “uowmspy uorkg fo tsajzsnoyd a MARTE S RES Aan Re Oe conte ge Danie: aenta | OIdVY AHL LOAdSNI OL NOISVOOO AHL JO FDVLNVAGY MOOL ‘dWVO MO OLNI SASYOH AHL ONIMOTION “WAAC V UuDWUWaary “sy “TJ GQ 004g BUMPING UP THE BOW and incidentally the radio, to our graceful lady visitors. The strange-looking and smelling box seemed to have a greater appeal to the curiosity of the pretty pair than did the salt to their palates. Once fully aware of it, they stopped licking for a while and confined their activities to stepping round and round the wonder in narrowing circles. By the time we had slipped and slid along into a position suitable for pictures, one of them had satis- fied her curiosity and gone back to munching the salty grass. The other, when I snapped at a hun- dred feet, was standing with extended neck, her sen- sitive nose sniffing not many inches away from the dials. Stalking still closer, I was about to snap again when a snort, ripped out at the edge of the timber, sent both of our afternoon-salt guests bound- ing away. ‘Their lord and master, evidently becom- ing suspicious over developments, had ordered his ladies home. Notwithstanding the character of the offering which first attracted our visitors, my photograph will attest that this story need not be taken cum grano salts, [39] CHAPTER III BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS ANOTHER night with snow flurries gave way to a day of ideal mountain photographic weather—sun- shine and squalls with their butterfly chases of lights and shadows. As this marked the beginning of our work with the cameras, a few words about the mak- ing of scenics may be in order before going on with the story of the expedition. With the veriest tyro of a movie fan sapient of all the tricks and intricacies of photo-play production, from the simplest of double exposures to the me- chanics of the opening up of the Red Sea to engulf the armies of Pharaoh, there is still very little knowl- edge of the “inside” work of shooting scenics. The generally accepted idea appears to be that a scenic moving-picture is made by simply going out and travelling among beautiful mountains and lakes and rivers and exposing film on the best of them as the camera-man goes along. This primitive idea of the genesis of the scenic I found held even by a dis- tinguished engineer who had described to me in de- tail how Notre Dame cathedral in the “Hunchback” [40] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS had been shot in a combination of solid sets and paintings on glass. The fact that an effective scenic shot might cost more time and trouble than the con- struction of a photo-play Babylon or Paris had never entered his head. The reason that the public has pushed behind the scenes in the case of the photo-play without ever sus- pecting that there was any “‘behind” to the scenic is doubtless due to the fact that it knows that the former is the result of an attempt to create an illusion, while the latter is merely an attempt to hold a mirror up to Nature. This view is correct in the main, but what the general public appears never to have sufh- ciently understood is the fact that, in many instances, holding the mirror up to Nature may require quite as much preparation and trouble as the creation of an illusion. Nature cannot be coerced nor even cajoled; she can only be humoured and waited upon. It is successful humouring and waiting that makes for the successful scenic. As a by no means extreme example of what wait- ing on Nature may involve, I might mention the work, time and privation incident to getting a mov- ing picture of Mount Columbia some weeks later on the expedition on which we were now embarked. Knowing that this most beautiful pinnacle had never [41] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES been photographed from the north even by ordinary cameras, we planned a deviation from our original itinerary that would take us to the head of the Athabaska, which drains toward the Arctic from the Columbia peak and icefield. This called for a hundred miles of travel up and down flooded valleys and over glaciers and passes, where four or five miles a day was good progress and where there was con- stant risk of losing horses and packs in swimming swollen rivers. Reaching timber-line at the head of the Athabaska with exhausted horses, we were assailed by a series of storms which completely shut out the mountain from view for eight consecutive days. At the end of that time, with the horses all but starved from lack of grass and our own provisions reduced almost to the vanishing point, we were rewarded by half an hour of slanting afternoon sunshine which set off the splendid peak with such a lighting as it may not have had for years. We were on reduced rations for a week as a consequence of that vigil, and some of the horses never did regain their full strength; but we got our pictures, both stills and movies. The photographer on the “lot” has always in his favour the fact that he is working with sets built for no other purpose than to shoot most effectively [42] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS under ideal lighting conditions. The scenic pho- tographer has to take Nature as he finds her, and it is undeniable that some of the most beautiful natural manifestations have not good “screen faces.” There are features like the Yosemite, Kaiteur Falls and the Matterhorn which, in the picturesque parlance of the camera-man, “shoot like a million dollars.” With a composition as perfect as that of a built-to- order studio miniature, the photographer has only to wait for the clouds and sunshine which will give the light and shadows to register moods. There are other great natural wonders, like the Grand Canyon of the Colorado or the Yguazu Falls, which are always disappointing in the pictures, especially to those who have seen them as they are. They make interesting views, but—principally be- cause they can be pictured only in bits—fail to put their personalities onto the screen. The magnificent Fall of the Athabaska is a case in point from our present trip. This beautiful cataract, falling from an open valley into a deep gorge, is bathed in so unequal a light that one part of its shimmering shaft of leaping water cannot be photographed properly without greatly over- or under-exposing all the rest. ‘This condition prevails at low and middle stages of water. At flood stage [43] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES the great horseshoe of tumbling white is completely obscured by the heavy mists floating up from the surges in the rocky gorge below. Save for the occasional bursting of a dam or the breaking of the waves of a storm against a sea-wall, Nature’s greatest action pictures are rarely caught by the camera. The eruption of a volcano is occa- sionally filmed, but only from a safe distance. Erup- tion, earthquake and cyclone pictures are usually pictured only in the aftermaths of disaster. ‘This js also true of cloudbursts. The man on the spot sel- dom has a camera of any kind, especially one for taking motion pictures. Or if he has, the light or his vantage may be wrong. A still picture which I took from a very favourable position of a tremendous cloudburst pouring over a castellated pinnacle above the Grand Canyon of the Colorado came out on the film no more savage than a summer sunset. I have never heard of a good picture of a major avalanche, though a camera-man who accompanied me to the head waters of the Columbia in the Selkirks of Canada missed by a hair the chance of a lifetime to make such a shot. Or perhaps I should say that he missed it by an echo, for that was what was really at the bottom of the heart-breaking failure. This occurred at the Lake of the Hanging Glacier, [44] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS whither we had journeyed by pack-train to make the preliminary shots for the filming of a boat trip from the source to the mouth of the Columbia on which I was about to embark. The setting for a movie was incomparable. The “Hanging Glacier,” a mile wide across its face, closed the farther end of the lake with a two- hundred-foot wall of solid ice. Back of this was an ice-sheathed cliff two thousand feet or more in height, crowned by a snow-cap, white and smooth as a marble dome, sparkling against a sky of deep azure. The lake itself was a glittering emerald nestling in a setting of glaciers and ancient snows, with its glassy surface reflecting the bizarre shapes of float- ing icebergs and the reversed images of towering walls. In an endeavour to get some life and action into the movie shots we were trying to set some of the floating icebergs in motion by exploding sticks of dynamite under them. It was this that was re- sponsible for creating what I am inclined to believe was the greatest opportunity ever presented to a moving-picture operator to film one of the most stupendous of Nature’s manifestations. The brink of the great ice-cap must have been all but ready to fall by its own weight. The shock of [45] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES the detonating dynamite provided just the sort of jar that was necessary to start it ahead of Nature’s schedule. The whole far end of the lake suddenly seemed to be falling in. The tumbling cap formed an unbroken cataract of glittering ice and snow—a mile wide and half a mile high—right down to the level of the glacier. And the jar of this avalanche set the glacier itself vibrating, so that all of the lake- ward wall of it cracked off and fell into the water to form a fresh phalanx of wallowing icebergs. A strange trick of alpine acoustics was responsible for the fact that this tremendous picture was not per- petuated upon celluloid. The camera-man, with his instrument already set up to catch the bobbing of the imminent bergs as the dynamite awakened them to life, would have needed but a few seconds to swing round his long-focus lens and train it upon the great slide. Unfortunately, those precious moments were lost trying to locate the disturbance on the side of the valley from which its thunderous echo car- omed down to the berg-battered beach upon which the camera was set up. By the time snow-glare- blinded eyes were squinting in the direction of the real avalanche the show was over and the opportun- ity of a lifetime gone. Only a few thin trickles of snow were streaking the face of the cliffs when he [46] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS finally swung his powerful telephoto upon them, and even these had ceased before he had found a focus. It was no end of a pity. I was present when some of the largest valangas of recent years were started in the Dolomites by the Italian artillery during the late war. Yet not all of these combined would have equalled a tithe of the weight and volume of the titanic avalanche of ice and snow set in motion by our innocent stick of dynamite at the Lake of the Hanging Glacier. And this illustrates another salient difference be- tween photo-play and certain kinds of scenic photog- raphy. On the “lot,” or even on location, if a scene is not shot to the liking of a director, he simply roars his classic “Rotten! Do it again!” and the whole action is repeated. ‘This can be, and often is, gone over a dozen times if necessary. But Nature cannot be handled in this summary fashion. Fixed and immutable things, of course, like mountain and waterfalls, stay right where they are, to be shot again and again as long as the light holds good. But slides that have slid are gone for- ever, and so, also, may be lost the sunset of a thou- sand that has to be passed up because the horse with the movie camera is down in the mud. [47] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Nor can a sheer-walled rapid, like so many I have run for a movie in the Grand Canyon of the Colo- rado and the Columbia, be shot again because the camera balks during the first attempt. Nor yet is it often practicable to risk horses and packs a second time in a dangerous river ford. In all trail and river pictures of this kind there is no “come back.” The failure of the first shot means the loss of the scene and possibly a break in the continuity of the scenic. The first scenics were no more than a series of dis- connected movie shots, screened about as one would turn the pages of a kodak album. These were fol- lowed by the so-called “travelogue” type, with a man walking through the pictures and pointing out the various objects of interest after the fashion of an animated Baedeker. This was an improvement, but the floor-walker manners of the cicerone often made the showing singularly reminiscent of “our Mr. Cohn” taking visitors over the newly opened wing of a department store. If there ever has been found a man who can “demonstrate” the panorama from a mountain-top without going through the wooden poses of an Indian cigar sign I have yet to see him on the screen. A world of snow and ice towering above a stream- [48] ZZV{ GaLSVO-Oldvu AO ASOd V ,.wALSA,, ONIAID fuvg ‘uowsny uoritg fo fKsajzsnoy Ladi auYOS SIH AAVS OL HOVd V ONIGIY «AALS |g,, Sung ‘uowsvyT uostg fo saqanoy BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS streaked valley is on a bit too vast a scale to be shown off like a real estate subdivision or a stack of Persian rugs. A few odds and ends of outdoor views (not inaptly called “screenics”) are still occasionally shown by the old bargain-counter method and to the accompan- iment of the wooden “‘ain’t that an eyeful” gesture. But the present-day maker of scenics has adopted the simpler, more intimate and less undignified plan of making the person who sees the picture screened a sort of silent partner in the expedition. This system is at its best where the scenic contemplates covering a barely explored region such as the one into which our present expedition was about to penetrate—a land which the public knows little or nothing about. A map, with a few words of history and topog- raphy, may be screened as an introduction; then the departure, followed by connected and carefully cor- related shots which tell the complete story of the expedition from start to finish. The outstanding scenic views will always be the main thing, but these will be linked by a series of shots showing the trou- bles, and perhaps the tragedies of the trail, the rou- tine and humours of camp life, with something also of the problems of transport and their solving. Five or six reels of a scenic intelligently made [49] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES along these lines should give one seeing it screened a clearer idea of a region of which he may never have previously heard than many weeks poring over books covering the identical section. The work and wor- ries, the thrills and griefs, of trying to introduce life, action and a human touch into such a modern scenic will unfold with the story of our expedition to “The Mother of Rivers.” The physical problems of the moving-picture ex- pedition going into rough and rarely traversed coun- try are very akin to those of the surveying party. Both may have to operate in regions of flooded val- leys and snowy passes, or in dense tropical jungles, or in trackless, waterless deserts; both may be able to reach their objectives only by the crossing of bro- ken icefields, or pushing in boats down hitherto un- run rapids. And besides the transport of food and clothing, each has to carry and protect delicate instruments, the loss of or injury to which would defeat the principal end of their expeditions. In this latter respect the film man has by far the more difficult problem. All of the standard motion- picture cameras are so much heavier than the transit, alidad or other instruments of the surveyor that the difficulty of protecting them is increased many fold. The best that can be done in other instances is to [50] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS provide strong, padded water-tight cases, and, wher- ever possible, to have these containers transported by hand at the points of greatest menace—bad rapids if travelling by river, broken slides of rock and fallen timber, if moving by pack-train. A motion-picture camera is as delicate as a watch and several hundred times as heavy. Carefully cased, it will survive all ordinary hazards of wilder- ness travel short of the rolling of a horse down a precipice or the smashing of a boatina rapid. Once out of its protective boxings, however, as it is at all times when about to be used, a fall of over a foot or two to anything save soft earth or snow will almost certainly wreak injury beyond all but factory repair. A springing of the metal frame too slight to be detected by the eye, or the least disalignment of the intricate cogs, may cause a jamming of the film that will ruin shot after shot. Extraordinary care at all times in carrying the camera is the best that can be done to save it, and it is astonishing the amount of difficult and even dangerous climbing that can be done with the heavy, cumbersome instrument with- out enough of a misstep to result in its permanent injury. Equally remarkable, on the other hand, is the way a movie camera will become obstreperous for no apparent reason at all save pure cussedness. [st] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Trouble of this kind almost invariably occurs at the beginning of an important shot—only too often, in- deed, one which there is no chance to make over again. A motion-picture camera can occasionally be coaxed into working order again following a com- plete and even a prolonged submergence in water or mud, but only in the event its operator is fully com- petent to take it apart and put it together again. If the tiniest grain of sand or the infinitesimal part of a drop of water are left after the cleaning trouble is certain to follow. Even the lenses have to be taken apart and thoroughly dried to get rid of possible moisture which will later form a blurring fog. Extremes of heat and cold are among the most difficult things with which the maker of scenics has to contend. In our boat voyage of 1923 through the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, for instance, tem- peratures running as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit so softened the film that it was impossible at times to reload it without injuring the emulsion. On the present trip, on the other hand, there were mornings when the mercury dropped down to 20 degrees below Zero. The delicate adjustments of the lenses could not be made with mittened fingers, yet the ordeal of [52] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS touching chilled metal which seared the skin like ~ contact with a hot stove was really one of the least of Harmon’s many troubles. His worst difficulty was that of preventing the fogging of his many lenses and filters. A camera brought from a fire-warmed tepee on a zero morning would always condense moisture which could only be completely removed when temperatures of the metals and glasses were reduced to that of the air. This trouble was min- imized by leaving all of our cameras, carefully cov- ered, out of doors during the night, but the difficulties which arose from the fogging of lenses from our own breaths was always with us on cold days. I fogged a filter on Castleguard (and incidentally spoiled an important picture) with the moisture from the same breath with which I was warning Harmon to keep his own frosted exhalations off his six-inch telephoto. The presence of abnormal amounts of static elec- tricity in the air of high mountain and desert regions is responsible for quite as much trouble to the moving-picture man as to the operator of a radio. The friction of the film on metal creates brilliantly flashing sparks which are registered on the negative in a form strikingly suggestive of the miniature bolts of lightning which they really are. A specially- coated anti-static film reduces the risk from this [53] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES source materially, as does also the practice of mini- — mizing friction by placing small strips of felt at all points where the celluloid strip passes over metal. In spite of all precautions, however, these bolts from the hand of a baby Jove are likely to descend at any moment to jazz their forkéd trail across an otherwise perfectly exposed strip of film. The physical difficulties of transporting and pro- tecting his outfit and of making technically perfect film, overcome as far as possible, the maker of a scenic can turn his attention to the picture itself. Where the shooting of a motionless subject, such as a mountain peak, a cliff or a valley, is concerned, one might think that the thing could be done quite as satisfactorily with a still as with a movie camera. This is, indeed, quite true if the peak alone is con- sidered. A stereopticon slide would show it off just as effectively as would a strip of running film, and without the flicker. But it is in its ability to intro- duce life and action into the picture that the movie has the advantage. The “slow-cranking” of the clouds blown across the half-revealed summit of a snow-capped peak makes it possible for the movement to be greatly ac- celerated by running the film through the projector at the normal rate on the screen showing, producing [54] Photo by L. R. Freeman CASTLEGUARD FALLS 1 a - ‘ srs Be Ss ‘ i i ie ES "4 . 2 Ss ; ; t : ; 3 ot ae < | Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff WRITING UP RADIO NOTES AT BOW LAKE CAMP BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS the effect of a breaking storm so often resorted to in photo-play shots. Waving trees, nodding reeds at the border of a wind-rippled lake, or a flowing stream add immeasurably to the effect of the snowy peak towering in the background in majestic immo- bility. Finally, there is the use of human figures in the foreground. I have mentioned the way in which many scenics are marred by the wooden posturings of “demon- strators” who give the impression of trying to auction the screened landscape at so much a yard. Unless a man can stand out on a rock and look at a mountain or valley in more or less the same way he would if he knew there was no clicking movie camera within a thousand miles, he had much better be kept out Seine pictute entirely. “Learnin’ ‘em to act nateral” is one of the most baffling problems con- fronting the scenic director. Admonishing a packer or a boatman just to “be natural” is giving a “‘counsel of perfection” no more practical to follow than Jerome K. Jerome’s direc- tion to the young man who would be a success in society. It is no less difficult to be natural to order before a cranking camera than it would be to “adopt an easy and pleasing manner, especially toward ladies,” as the British humourist suggested. [55] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES If it is simply an ordinary routine trail or camp shot, such as unpacking the horses or pitching the tepee, it is usually enough to get the background and the lightings right and tell the men to “Make it snappy!” The accelerated action concentrates their minds on the work in hand and keeps it off the dis- concerting glare of the one-eyed box. But taking them out on a skyline cliff, between the Devil of the camera and the Deep Sea of Nature, and keeping them still the simple, unaffected children of the wild is quite another matter. Self-consciousness su- pervenes instantly on a solemn occasion of that kind, and unless this is exorcized one’s lithe, graceful, pic- turesque woodsmen become straightaway wooden cigar-signs. The obvious remedy, of course, is to make them forget themselves, and to this end I have found noth- ing more effective than a run of inconsequential chatter directed from anywhere behind the field of the lens. Almost any kind of patter that comes into the head will do as a rule, but funny stories—espe- cially those of a subtle character—are best avoided. If the men get the point they are likely to be so tickled over it, and incidentally their own cleverness, as to laugh right out of their parts. If they miss the point, on the other hand, they are certain to become [56] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS even more wooden than if Nature had been allowed to take her course. A story which proved a boomerang and broke me for good and all of the narrative plan of off-stage recitative to make the units of my human fore- ground forget themselves and ‘‘act nateral,” was told on a peak of the Selkirks in making the preliminary shots for my voyage down the Columbia. Ninety feet of a wonderful sunset across a purple-shadowed valley had been cranked, with but ten left to go, when my story came to an end. Instantly the look of “rapt admiration” on the face of my head-packer and leading man was replaced by a broadening grin as the point drove home and began to tickle his risi- bilities. ‘The grin gave way to a chuckle, and that to a thunderous guffaw and the announcement that the yarn reminded “of the dance-hall gal down in Revelstoke that had one of them fluffy white pups allus wore under the arm.’”’ Of course he stepped right out of his part of “‘scenery-awed woodsman”’ right then and there to tell what “Wild Bill of the Big Bend of the Columbia” did to that “gol dern pup”—and of course the whole shot had to be made over in a fading light. There is no end of the things that can turn up to throw a monkey-wrench into the machinery of a [57] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES perfectly-oiled and smoothly running scenic shot. On one occasion on our present trip it was a big bull moose; on another it was a small dead mouse. The moose, lumbering down from a slide on the mountain- side, stampeded a part of the pack-train that was being bunched for a shot up the Athabaska River with Mount Columbia in the distance. The sad part of it was that, besides frightening the horses out of the picture, the moose—a magnificent specimen with an especially fine head—swerved off into the timber just before getting inside the focus himself. The intervention of the mouse was even more se- rious, but that story I will tell in its proper sequence. The handling of a series of scenic shots where it is desirable to introduce a touch of educational interest is well illustrated by the manner in which we filmed the panorama from the summit of Mount Castle- guard, overlooking the great Columbia Icefield. This is not only one of the most beautiful mountain views in the world, but also one of the most interest- ing. Besides looking out on a veritable sea of lofty peaks notching the skyline to a distance of over a hundred miles in every direction, one may fix his eye upon almost the exact point in the middle of the hundred and fifty square miles of the great mer de glace where the drainage to three major oceans di- [58] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS vides. As I have stated in an earlier chapter, this is the only place on the face of the earth where three great rivers, each flowing to a distinct and separate sea, head at one topographical apex. Our problem here was to give as graphic portrayal as possible upon the film of this unique geographic phenomenon. First, in order to make the most of the scenic effects, a complete three hundred and sixty-degree panorama was shot, using the lenses and filters best calculated to bring out the lights and shadows of the surrounding world of ice and snow. ‘Three of the packers who had made the ascent with us were then grouped in the foreground of a shot directed toward a point where a break in the western rim of the ice- field indicated the gorge where the Bush River drained to the Columbia. In a similar way the rifts draining to the Athabaska and Saskatchewan were shot in turn, the men in each instance looking toward the focus of interest and gesturing in a way intended to indicate that they were talking and thinking of the remarkable three-way dispersion of the meltage from the great icefield. This made place for titles telling how the waters of the western drainage ultimately flowed to the Pacific, those of the northern to the Arctic and those of the eastern and southern slopes to Hudson’s Bay and the [59] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Atlantic. It also gave opportunity for subsequent cut-ins of bits of scenes from the three great rivers and oceans, showing the mental pictures conjured up in the minds of the men as they looked down on the rounded hump of ice and snow forming the strange and wonderful continental apex. Shots of a humorous character occasionally go very well in camp scenes but are usually calculated to detract from the dignity of a great mountain, val- ley or other natural setting. We made an exception to our rule of not making shots of this kind, however, when one of the packers, twirling his rope and leap- ing through the loop of it on the brink of a three- thousand-foot cliff, offered an opening for some such title as “The Highest Jump on Record” that was too strong to resist. » Little shots of this kind, as long as they stop short of horse-play and comedy slap-stick stuff, are fre- quently desirable by way of relieving the tension that is likely to be strung to the breaking point by too long a footage of straight unadulterated “Ain’t Na- ture grandp” scenes. Camp-shots, because they can be made on days when the light is unfavourable for photographing landscape, offer few difficulties save on the score of variety. Packing, setting up tents, tossing flapjacks [60] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS and similar routine work have been done to a finish; also camp-fire shots by flare-light. J myself, on my Columbia River trip, introduced the only drastic variation ever filmed in a camp-fire scene when I walked into the picture and sat down on a smoulder- ing log instead of the roll of blankets which had been placed for me. And even the fine frenzy of that highly unconventional action was ruined for the screen when my flying leap for the river carried some very expressive and unpremeditated panto- mime out of camera range. Pies and cakes, produced as by the wave of a magic wand from an ash-covered Dutch oven, are “sure-fire” stuff in camp shots; also such little touches as candles improvised from twisted strips of bacon decorating a birthday cake. Some lively action shots are always provided by a bucking pack-horse, provided you are so fortunate as to have one in the outfit. Ornery animals that have to be thrown before shoeing also make for hectic action. ‘The best potential action shots on the trail —on the occasions when the real grief occurs—are not often made. A horse with its head doubled up under its back in the mud and in imminent danger of breaking its neck, almost invariably demands the instant help of all hands including the camera-man; [61] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES likewise an animal with a valuable pack about to be sucked under a log-jam by a twenty-mile current or down between rolling boulders at a rocky ford. It is also practically de rigeur in scenic trail etiquette to throw a rope or extend an alpenstock to a man down a crevasse before starting to crank film on his predicament. As, in actual practice, it is usually the preoccupied and temperamental camera-man him- self who drops into the hole in the ice, this nice discrimination is not often demanded. Dogs are frequently very effective in trail and camp shots, but unless highly intelligent are likely to make a deal more trouble than they are worth. We had one dog on the present trip—a collie-husky cross- breed—which performed brilliantly in riding packs across swollen streams, registering the whole gamut of canine emotions with the radio head-phones over his ears, and even dragging the receiving set itself part of the way across the glacier on an improvised sledge to save the delicate instrument from the almost annihilative rigours of pack-train transport. “Buster” was the motif for several hundred feet of live, snappy film, or just about the same footage that was completely ruined by his mate, an Indian-bred mongrel which had a special penchant for licking lenses and capering figure “8’s” between the legs of [62] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS men planted in the foreground of a scenic shot to register “rapt admiration” or “awed wonder.” No man, least of all a packer with his high spirit and prima donna temperament, is capable of registering “awed wonder” while teetering to regain a dog- destroyed balance on the edge of a thousand-foot cliff and swearing in cataclysmic Cree and English at the cause of his troubles. Cataracts and rapids have enough action of their own for a movie, but, unless one is striving to perpet- uate a mirror effect, the surface of a lake shoots better when stirred by a breeze. Inasmuch as a wind-machine is not among the “props” that can be carried by pack-train or boat, one usually has to wait until Nature is in a propitious mood if it is a breeze- rippled lake that is the destderatum of the moment. Effective agitation, though hardly similar to that of wind action, can, however, be obtained in various ways. One may, for instance, take a leaf out of the book of Xerxes, who gave the Aegean (or was it the Bos- porus?) a good beating with whips because it had engulfed some of his transports. Lashing a lake surface with the limbs of trees—the actual lashing beyond camera range, of course—will throw up a very merry little dance of ripples to brighten a back- [63] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES lighting effect or set nodding a lacustrine fringe of reeds. If more violent artificial action is demanded there remains dynamite, which is easy to transport and safe enough to handle if reasonable care is ex- ercised. Besides the accidental starting of a whole mountain-side sliding, as I have already described, we produced one very effective close-at-hand av- alanche by the use of dynamite on my Columbia expedition. ‘The details of this stirring episode have been told elsewhere.’ Wild animal photography, both still and movie, is in a,Class of its own, though a few shots of game in its native haunts cuts into a scenic very effectively. It demands patience and nerve on the part of the operator, both in large measure. As in hunting, suc- cess depends very largely upon luck. Indefatigable climbing is the main thing in shooting goat or sheep, either with gun or camera. In the case of the latter, however, many a heart-breaking clamber is stripped of reward by impossible light or backgrounds. Deer, elk, moose and caribou require interminable stalking, and sometimes driving, to get them in effec- tive pictorial surroundings. Bear are usually not hard to mancuvre into a po- sition for a movie shot, nor, ordinarily, is there more 1 See “Down the Columbia.” [64.] ANIT AMS NO UAIOVID MOM HLIM dWVO ANVT MOa fuvg ‘uomsvy uoskg fo fsazsno) aNVT MOF uUuDnumaad.t “WY “J €q o,0Yg i secon BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS than a negligible element of danger in it. A she- bear with cubs, however, albeit quite the finest subject conceivable, is a creature of uncertain temper and had best be kept at a distance or covered with a rifle. How we made some highly successful movies of a very pugnacious old lady bear and her two cubs by shooting them across an impassable gorge with a telephoto lense I will tell in a later chapter. I have seen a Nepalese tiger, charging a cranking camera-man, stopped by a covering rifle; also a movie of a very similar occurrence with an African rhino. ‘The one onslaught which I have seen that nothing could stop, and which came within a hair of blotting out the life of the photographer who stood his ground by his camera, was that of a mountain goat. That the goat had been dead for twenty-four hours, and was frozen stiff as well, did not make the affair a whit less serious. ‘The incident occurred in the Selkirks, in 1920, and the camera-man was Byron Harmon, my associate of the present expedition. I was working with my own outfit at the time and so figured in the near-tragedy only as a spectator. Harmon had been trying vainly for several weeks to make a film showing the stalking and shooting of the goat among its native crags. Several fine spec- imens had been brought down with a rifle, but not [65] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES one of them under conditions of lighting and setting that made the resultant film at all satisfactory. Fin- ally he conceived the idea of making the killing part of the shot in bright sunlight with a goat already dead. To this end a big “billy,” shot on the cliffs a thousand feet above the glacier at twilight, was left where he had fallen. The next day they proceeded to enact a “shooting” which could be adequately transferred to the film. While my party was filming a scene in an ice cave at the glacier which was to be the introduction of my Columbia River picture, Harmon had finished setting the stage for his goat scenes. He planned to make two shots—one of his packers firing at the goat—propped up in a lifelike position behind a ledge of rock—and the other of the body of the goat falling to the glacier. The “killing” of the goat went off quite satisfac- torily, both in long shots and close-ups. A con- cealed string to the goat’s hind leg insured a realistic toppling over even after two bullets pierced the whis- kered head without budging the stiffly-braced frozen frame. The hitch came at the shooting of the old “billy’s”’ thousand-foot “leap of death” to the ice of the glacier. Harmon, in setting up his camera as near as he [66] BEHIND THE SCENES OF SCENICS could to the point where the “leap of death” was going to culminate, had made his estimate not wisely but too well. From where I watched through my binoculars it looked as though the hurtling body was almost certainly going to strike both camera and operator. Nor did the sequel prove my judgment wrong. Harmon, suddenly alarmed by our shouts and the swift increase of size of the white ball in his finder, ducked just in time to turn a solid collision into a sharp rap from a flying hoof or horn. Some other section of goat anatomy knocked the tripod out of true. Neither camera nor camera-man was injured; yet, with the two hundred pounds of bone and frozen flesh throwing up a veritable geyser of pulverized ice and snow at its impact with the gla- cier, I have always felt that the passing of the missile six inches farther to the right would have torn both to pieces. The picture, when I saw it on the screen in Mon- treal, proved most realistic—a highly thrilling and convincing piece of Nature photography! It was doubtless Harmon’s experience on this oc- casion which was responsible for his decision to confine such animal shots as he made on our present expedition strictly to living specimens, with close-ups of all kind absolutely barred. [67] CHAPTER IV BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN WITH the morning of August 20th promising at least a few hours of perfect photographic weather, we proceeded to show our thankfulness by contriving one or two little effects calculated to encourage Na- ture for providing so nearly an ideal picture setting at Bow Lake and Glacier. I have already described how the towering ice-wall, with its flanking water- falls, ran back in successive waves of serracs to and over the crest of the continental device. This was just as it should be for a picture; and so was the many-armed lake, extending from the ice-fronts which gave it life along a red-brown mountain wall to the broken water of its draining rapids. Al that was lacking was a proper foreground, and this we hastened to add by pitching a camp on the beach opposite the face of the main glacier. In regions of savage storms like the Canadian Rockies, camp-sites must be chosen for utility rather than picturesqueness. Shelter from the winds is the first consideration, and protecting cliffs or timber almost invariably close or restrict the long, unbroken [68] BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN sweep of vista so necessary for the ideal camp-shot. And so we took down our tepee and set it up for a few hours just where it was needed to complete the composition of the lakescape—a jutting point of shingle thrown out by the clear mountain streamlet winding down through the flowery meadows from Bow Pass. That the jauntily-cocked pyramid of sticks and canvas was open to every wind that blew had nothing to do with the matter. Neither did the fact that a six-inch rise of the mountain torrent which had laid the tepee’s precarious foundation of pebbles would have swept it into the Lake. Nor yet did it matter that there was not a stick of firewood within three hundred yards. It was pictures we were after to- day, not shelter or comfort; and for pictures the location of the tepee on that wave-washed and wind- swept strip of pebbles was almost perfection. With the camera set up in the middle of the streamlet and turned southwest, the ideally balanced composition included our improvised camp in the foreground, the lake in the middle distance, with Bow Glacier—showing up much as I described it at our first view from the easterly arm—forming a sun-brilliant background against a shifting wall of light-shot clouds. [69] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Set up on the beach and turned south-east, the finder of the camera showed tepee and lake, the > and a rocky pine-clad islets above “The Narrows,’ mountain-side ripped and scarred by the savage claws of the bizarre Crowsfoot Glacier.’ With our “Ideal setting’ complete and our full battery of cameras in action, we shot the lake and its ice-crowned sentinels, mood by mood, from sunrise to sunset. There was an hour of repose in the early morning, when every glacier and rock and tree-covered point was reflected, to the last, least detail, in the glassy, unrippling surface. Then there was a spell of smil- ing under the golden glow of the light-suffused eastern clouds, followed by a madcap dance of mirth and laughter, with the direct sunlight turning the breeze-stirred waves to shoals of diamonds and emeralds. Laughter gave way to frowning, when shoal on 1 Just why a glacier that is formed of snow, the universal symbol of immaculate whiteness, should be named from a bird whose jetty plumage is popularly accepted as the “blackest of things black,” I have never heard satisfactorily explained. The jewel of consistency, however, has never been set in the forehead of the god who inspires the nomenclature of natural features. The straggling tentacles of ice in question really do have a remarkable resemblance to the leg and talons of some giant fowl, but, being snowy in color, it is at least open to argument that some such bird as the ptarmigan or the White Leghorn should have been nomen- claturally honored in preference to the crow. [70] Photo by L. R. Freeman CROW’S FOOT GLACIER, LOOKING ACROSS FOOT OF BOW LAKE ONINHAT ANVS AHL dQ GIMOId AYAM SAUOOS SATUAS GTYOM ‘da TaWassvau “AdSYOH MOVd ONINMONA V AG «AAILSVOAVONUd,, OIdVaY AHL AO SLNAWOVYA AHL UAAO SNYUNOW NOWUVH UdULdIAT “YY “JT Wq 004g BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN shoal of murky thunderclouds poured over the con- tinental divide and quenched the golden flame of the streaming sunshine under a swiftly flung pall of sudden night. And when another wild blade of a free-lancing squall came bounding up the valley of the Bow and attacked the first in the middle of the lake, bluster and frown gave way to real tantrums. No star of the movies ever registered more moods and expressions between daylight and dark than did this lovely Lady of Bow Lake. By dint of much cranking and focussing, we transferred them, one after the other, to imperishable celluloid. A flare-back of the tantrum mood caught Harmon and me and the whole flock of cameras in mid-lake in a diminutive home-made boat while I was trying to pull him across to get a close-up of the Crows- foot Glacier. There were a few hectic moments when the conflict of warring airs suggested the classic description of a kindred storm in Drum- mond’s poem: “De win’ she blow from nor’-eas’-wes’,— De sout’ win’ she blow too—” With the lake trying to stand on end for a mad minute or two, and a flimsy craft that changed shape every time I laid hard upon the oars, there wasn’t [71] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES much to do but try to keep the so-called bow to- ward the highest wave of the moment. That, and Harmon’s lively baling, sufficed by a margin not quite comfortable. Nor were our apprehensions entirely on the score of the negative buoyancy of the movie camera. It takes a very warm blooded man not to chill in swim- ming over a hundred yards in glacier water, and we were a good half mile off shore when the little dis- turbance kicked up. We had no trouble reaching the beach once the centre of the squall went on about its business. The lesson in the ways of a wind with a mountain lake came in good time. It prevented us from try- ing the same kind of argosy on other waters that were broader and deeper and just as cold as that temperamental patch of drippings from Bow Glacier. As the sky cleared toward the end of the afternoon we prepared to release our first pigeons. The mes- sages, giving the names of the several radio stations already picked up and additions to lists of supplies that were to be sent to us some weeks later at Jasper, were typed compactly on the oiled paper provided for that purpose. After pulling loose several tail feathers in an endeavor to attach the tightly folded [72] BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN slips as directed by experts, we finally abandoned that plan and slipped them inside of the leg-rings worn by each bird to carry its registered number. Tied with silk threads, the tiny rolls appeared in a way to ride quite securely. Two birds—a pair—were released simultaneously. Teaming up at once, they rose in widening circles for perhaps a thousand feet, and then made off, ap- parently with great confidence, on a line a bit to the east of the general direction of the valley of the Bow. As this was almost the exact compass bearing of Banff, we felt certain they would be pecking at the door of their home cote inside of a couple of hours. Just why they failed to fulfil our hopes we never learned, but the chances are that, failing to find— or possibly failing to effect entrance after finding— their former home, they went in search of another. The messages were mailed to Banff a few days later, but whoever found the pigeons evidently thought them too attractive to part with. The astonishing adaptability of the carrier pigeons to the roughest of travel conditions was a source of never-ending wonder to us throughout the trip. Apparently not the least troubled by the swaying of their box on the top of a pack, nor even by the crush- ing in or knocking off of their flimsy home by an [73] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES overhanging limb, they were always ready for their sparsely-doled ration of cracked grains and never failed to meet with a caressing peck the friendly finger poked in by way of greeting through a tiny window. We heard them crooning their content- ment on nights when the camp was blanketed in snow and on days of grief and drizzle in the sodden flooded flats. They would even chirrup reassuringly to each other when their pack-horse was bogged to his eyes, with the next moment threatening their own engulf- ment in glacial mud. We found the game little aerial navigators boon companions from first to last, and I never released one of the warm little bodies from my hand to begin its orlentating spirals above the icy peaks that sep- arated it from its home cote without a real tug at the heart strings. Three days’ rest with prime grazing had made a great difference in the condition of the horses by the time we broke camp again on the 21st, and, though travel conditions continued no less arduous than be- fore, much steadier progress was made. Bow Pass, a little below timber-line, was reached and crossed by an easy grade. The crest of the watershed—in an open meadow thick with lush grass and fragrant with mountain flowers—sloped so gradually in both [74] BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN directions that the divide was barely discernible. The descent to the valley of the Mistaya—rough, abrupt and slippery though it proved—was effected with the knocking off of only three or four packs. One of these, unfortunately, contained the radio. The pack-box of the latter, brass-screwed and pad- ded on the inside, was constructed to withstand rough usage, and that is why it only changed shape instead of flying apart the first time the hulking cayuse carry- ing it was brought up sharp as his overly-broad load jammed between two close-growing pines. The stout case of tough cedar stood that first colli- sion astonishingly well; also the buffetings of a somersaulting roll down a slide of avalanche-strewn rocks to a temporary resting place in a bower of sylvan beauty where a crystal-clear spring bubbled out of the limestone of the opposite wall of the can- yon. It was even recognizable as a box after it had been on the under side of the pack for ten minutes while its bearer sunk to his ears in a bottomless patch of muskeg. But when a chafed lash-rope parted and let the casket slide down and dangle against ‘“‘Wolverine’s”’ temperamental heels, the moment had come when it was no longer possible to follow to the letter the ad- monition of the Banff electrical expert, who had [75] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES warned us solemnly that the usefulness of the set would depend upon our keeping the batteries hooked up exactly as he had assembled them. Even finding the component parts was difficult enough, for “Wolverine” had proved his qualifications as a radio horse by “broadcasting” the battered fragments of the outfit through half a mile of swamp, timber and boulder-covered mountain-side. Abandoning hopes of ever assembling again a wreck which, like Humpty-Dumpty, might well have defied the best technical efforts of ‘‘all the King’s horses and all the King’s men,” we simply collected such pieces we could find, roped them up in the shattered case and took them along as a potential movie “prop’—something calculated to give a touch of topical interest to the camp shots. That the battered batch of junk could ever again be coaxed into performing its original function no one but our sanguine French-Canadian cook had the temerity to maintain, and even Ulus’ soaring op- timism, along with the rest of the outfit, underwent a serious dampening when that containing the rem- nants of the radio came in for the worst soaking of all the packs, while several of the horses went down in the long boggy ford above the Waterfowl Lakes. A splendid buck, chased by the dogs, gave us a [76] BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN wonderful exhibition of grace and agility at one of the upper rapids of the Mistaya. Submerged to his horn-tips in a roaring foam-white chute at the end of his first jump, he rebounded with the airy grace of Venus emerging from the Cyprian sea-froth at his second, to land solidly upon the farther bank of the torrent. “Buster” and “Tip,” with lolling tongues, were left gaping foolishly and yelping futile protest in the midst of the muddy seep to which they had skidded in bringing up short as the tumbling cascade yawned below them. ‘They thought they had been running an ordinary four-footed animal, and it had turned out to be something scarcely less elusive than the goose whose whirring wings had baffled them in the Bow. A herd of a dozen deer, offering easy shots as they watched us file down the valley, were passed unmo- lested. This was for two reasons. We were still too heavily packed to have room to carry meat, and we were also about to enter a region in which there were few points at which an hour’s climb with a rifle would not result in goat or sheep. We had neither the time nor the inclination to shoot for trophies, a pastime that is more and more coming to be restricted to the novice and the tenderfoot. The killing of big game with modern high-power rifles has become so L77] “ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES ridiculously easy in all parts of the world as no longer to deserve the name of sport. Park boundaries, which we touched and crossed at several points, interfered somewhat at first with our shooting for meat at the moment a shortage oc- curred. As soon as pack-room was available, how- ever, it was easy to lay in enough of a supply in the unrestricted sections to carry us through those in which shooting was not legal. Meat keeps a long time at those high cold altitudes, and after the first week we were rarely out of it during the whole trip. The Mistaya was a roaring boulder-strewn torrent where we first came down to it, but at the end of a mile broadened out into meandering channels empty- ing into the head of Upper Waterfowl Lake. Seyvy- eral deep fordings and a long, wet wade through boggy marshes took us to a precarious camping ground among the burned timber on the sloping mountainside east of the head of the lake. The lat- ter, beautiful to the eye, especially from a high al- titude, was too boggy around the border to permit even the dipping of drinking water without risk of being mired. We remained over here for a day to climb a couple of thousand feet to the summit of the easterly ridge for a vantage from which to take pictures of the [78] BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN splendid panorama of Howse Peak and Pyramid, with the silvered slivers of the Upper and Lower Waterfowl Lakes, harnessed in tandem by the gleam- ing ribbons of the Mistaya’s channels, prancing in the sunlit foreground. As it was impossible to ford the Mistaya in the canyons below, the only practicable route on to the Saskatchewan was to retrace our steps around the head of the lakes and go down the western side. This entailed deep but not especially troublesome. fording; or, rather, it would not have been trouble- some had the horses had the sense to keep to the crossings into which they were headed. Among the animals which thought they knew a better way was the young mare carrying the salt and sugar. Rolled head under at the little riffle below the ford and carried down a couple of hundred feet before pawing onto solid footing, the venturesome filly trotted jauntily out, smeared herself with muck by a roll in the nearest mud-hole, and then galloped on to set the pace for the pack-train all the rest of the morning. Comprehension of the reason for the culprit’s blitheness of spirit came when we unpacked at the end of the afternoon. What with leakage of brine from the salt sacks and syrup from the sugar, Nelly [79] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES had reduced the weight of her pack at the rate of rather better than ten pounds to the mile all the way to the Saskatchewan. This must have been the sort of thing which ‘“Soapy” had in mind when he spoke of letting Na- ture take her course in the matter of reducing packs. To do the veteran justice, he seemed as much upset as any of us over the loss, and even promised to pun- ish a possible repetition of the offence by giving Nelly the dried fruit and dehydrated vegetables to carry when we took the trail again. This he forgot to do, however, much to our ultimate sorrow. We came down to the Saskatchewan a mile above where it receives the Mistaya in the shadow of pin- nacled Mount Murchison, and just below the junc- tion of the North Fork and Howse River. Although not over from fifteen to twenty-five miles from its principal glacial sources, it is already a mighty river, varying in width from five hundred yards to half a mile according to the stage. Nothing allows a river to accumulate volume so rapidly as a series of great glacial reservoirs tapped by its head waters, and in few if any of the great mountain system of the world are these ice feeders located so favorably for the rapid augmentation of flow as in the Columbia Icefield region. [80] sez te mas: Photo by L. R. Freeman HARMON COMING OUT OF A DEEP FORD OF THE SASKATCHEWAN suvg ‘Uuouwsny uoskg fo Ksajzanoj NVMAHOLVASVS AHL AO SHYOd AHL LY GuOA ONINWIMS daad BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN The Amazon, which probably discharges fifty times the amount of water into the Atlantic as does the Saskatchewan into Hudson’s Bay, almost cer- tainly has no tributary with a flow a hundred miles from the summits of the Cordillera of the Andes equal to that of the Canadian river twenty-five miles from the Columbia Icefield. I am also inclined to think that the same would hold true in a general way of the Yangtse, flowing east from the Tibetan plateau, and the Indus and Brahmaputra, flowing south. The Athabaska, flowing north from the Columbia Icefield, probably has an even greater volume in its upper reaches than has the Saskatchewan. On the other hand, the drainage to the Columbia, by the Wood and Bush rivers, is much smaller. Working cautiously from bar to bar and covering perhaps seven hundred yards of quick-flowing, but not dangerous water, we reached the north bank without swimming the horses or seriously wetting a pack. Camp was pitched in the timber at a magnificent point of vantage just below the mouth of the North Fork. ‘That the place was an old Indian rendezvous was indicated by rotting tepee poles, the bent willow frames of steam bath-houses, and deep layers of [81] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES musty hair scraped by the tanners from hides of deer, elk and moose. The Indians of the plains never established per- manent habitations far inside the Rockies, but that they hunted the vast system to the very rim of the ice-caps of the continental divide was indicated by their ancient and long disused trails, which we found on every pass and often far down into the timber. Never breaking down the earth save by the soft pat of moccasins or by the pressure of unshod hoofs, and rarely if ever cutting out timber, fallen or stand- ing, these old hunting parties still left behind them fragments of trails that could be improved only by the liberal use of ax and pick. Their grades are invariably as favourable as the topography permits. Not satisfied either with the lighting or the back- grounds for his original motion-picture of the pack- train crossing the Saskatchewan, Harmon decided to wait over and make another under better condi- tions. Two days of warm, cloudy weather were unfavourable for pictures but did have the effect of starting one of the heaviest late-summer rises that the Rockies have known in many years. The river, fed from its many melting glaciers, had risen two feet and probably more than doubled in volume when the third day brought bright skies and [82] BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN a flood of hot sunshine. With the crossing picked for the pictorial possibilities rather than for its facilities as a ford, it was evident at the outset that we were in for a lively time in taking the pack-train over the swollen river. For this reason dummy packs of canvas-wrapped fir boughs were substituted for boxes, bed rolls and the regular run of camp stuff. This plan had the double advantage of giving the horses lighter loads and of effectually precluding the possibility of a further soaking of outfit and pro- visions. There had been so great an increase in the volume of the river that Harmon and La Casse suc- ceeded only on the second attempt in crossing with the movie outfit at the broad, shallow ford which we had waded with so little trouble three days pre- viously. Setting up the camera on a high bench on the south bank, just above a point where almost the whole flow of the Saskatchewan was concentrated into a single two hundred-yard-wide channel, they signalled for us to come on with the pack-train. ‘“Soapy” led the way, with Baptie and me urging on the huddled, reluctant horses from the rear. “Buster,” our collie-husky cross-breed, rode one of the packs. “Tip,” our camp-following Indian mon- grel, who had funked a similar seat, I carried under my free arm. [83 ] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES ‘“Soapy’s” mare was swimming the moment she stepped off the gravel bar along the shore; likewise the rest of the animals as they followed suit. Sev- veral of them were ducked head-under as they lost their footings, to come up sputtering and wild-eyed, with each eager to climb to safety on the back of its neighbour. Packs were badly bumped and jostled, with two or three bundles of young Christmas trees breaking — loose and floating downstream in mute vindication of the wisdom of substituting them for the sugar and the radio. “Buster” was knocked from his seat at the first souse; but “Tip,” clinging with an almost cat-like grip, managed to keep hooked on to the crook of my arm. Orientating themselves as the shock of the first plunge passed, the horses spread out and began lunging along in the wake of the leader, which ‘‘Soapy” was trying hard to keep swimming at an angle that would carry her out at the only practicable landing on the cut and broken opposite bank. Seeing the swift current was setting him down much faster than had been calculated, with the al- ternative of making the landing or going onto, and possibly under, a pile of drift logs blocking the en- trance of a side channel opening just below, he slid [84] BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN off backwards and towed by the tail to give his horse a better chance. Still failing to close with the land- ing fast enough, “Soapy” wisely headed his horse back to midstream so as to give the drift a wide berth and make a bar where the river broadened and shallowed below. J would have done better to follow “Soapy’s” lead while there was time and room to avoid the treach- erous bank. With my powerful mount swimming strongly and with plenty of reserve strength, how- ever, I was reluctant to forego the chance to make the landing as prearranged and so keep all the pack animals that would follow as near the camera as possible. We made the bank, but too far down by a scant yard or two. The caving earth broke back under pawing hoofs, and both “Jerry” and I were doused well below the foam-flecked surface when we tum- bled back into the icy current. The shifty ‘“Tip,” sensing his chance, jumped at exactly the right moment, landing on dry ground with an almost dry hide. I slipped clear of the saddle to give my mount a better chance to recover his balance, but climbed back with alacrity on discovering that all of the immediately adjacent river was filled with floun- [85] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES dering and more or less up-ended pack-horses, all in difficulties similar to those of Jerry and myself, and for the same reason. The next moment the whole mob of us were slapped by the ten-mile current against the jutting jam of logs. With each of us trying to kick and climb over his wallowing, snorting neighbour, it was exceptionally good luck that none of the various participants in the mélée were much banged up. By really good fortune there was not enough water drawing beneath the logs to create a dangerous under-suck, nor yet enough flowing over them to tempt the horses to risk broken legs by climbing the obstruction. After we had pawed and jostled each other for a lively minute or so, the current got sufficiently behind the milling mob to roll it around the end of the barrier, from where it was straight swimming to the bar below. Seeing the high-class action that was going to waste under the high bank, Harmon brought his long-distance shot to a sudden end and rushed down for a close-up. Setting up with feverish haste, he was just in time for the finale at the log jam. There was a twinkle in his eye when, a few minutes later, he sauntered up to where we were drying out by tripping an Indian dance round a log fire and cas- [86] BOW LAKE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN ually asked if we’d mind doing the first part of that close-up over again! ‘“Soapy” replied with a guffaw on behalf of the horses, while I made similar re- sponse on my Own account. Harmon admitted that the request was not made seriously, and that he fully understood without trying it personally that a drift-pile throwing off a ten-mile- an-hour current was no place to take a pack-train, even one carrying nothing more valuable than Christmas trees. We did make the return by swim- ming the same channel, however, but starting high enough up to work well clear of the cut bank and the jutting log-pile. While filming the rough, steep gorge of the North Fork the following morning we were presented with the opportunity to make what turned out to be one of our best wild animal shots. A black bear playing with her cubs on a patch of sunlit rocks was the sub- ject. After a surreptitious shooting of the amusing’ antics of the trio with his long-focus lens from a comfortable distance, Harmon suggested that it might bring about an interesting variation of action if I would close in and make our presence known by some such friendly action as throwing a stone or giv- ing a lusty yell. I chose the latter as the less bellig- erent means of creating the desired diversion. [87] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES The effect of my Apache war-whoop, delivered from cupped hands at not over fifty feet from the three pairs of sharp, backlaid ears, was all that could have been wished for. Without even looking to see where the blast came from, that capable old mother swatted swiftly at a cub with either paw, and then herded them pell-mell up a nearby jack-pine. The instant the hindmost of the precious pair was clear of the ground, round she wheeled and came charging back to settle with the enemy. Full tilt she came, right to the brink of the gorge, and there, perforce, she was brought to an abrupt and sliding stop. That fifty-foot-wide canyon of the North Fork of the Saskatchewan was the keystone of our strategy, for we and the camera were on one side of it and the temperamental Mother Bruin on the other. That is quite the best way to arrange bear pictures in the open, especially when guns have been left in camp. The film turned out quite perfect to the last detail, even showing the cubs peeking round the sheltering tree to watch their mother shake an admonitory paw at us. [88] CHAPTER V BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD WE had our first serious trouble with far-straying horses during the three days spent in camp at the forks of the Saskatchewan. This was probably due to the fact that at least three or four of the animals knew exactly where they were, and that the rich grass of the fertile Kootenay Plains—a broadening of the lower river valley—was not many hours away. Rob, the wrangler, who knew no peace of mind when a single unit of his bunch was unaccounted for, spent many hours each day turning back and round- ing up the runaways. Using hobbles in a land of burned and fallen timber entailed too much risk of “hanging up” a horse over a log; indeed, my own powerful and spirited mare, La Belle, which “Soapy” had conditioned especially to carry the two hundred and forty pounds which I weighed at the beginning of the trip, snagged herself seriously in the belly with all four legs free. A Chinook wind from the Pacific, warm and soft as new milk, had been playing on the icefields to the north and west during all of the sixty hours we re- [89] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES mained in camp on the bench above the junction of the two main branches of the Saskatchewan. When we took the trail again on the morning of August 26th the humid spell was over and a brilliant flood of yellow sunshine was pouring from a deep turquoise sky unflecked by cloud or undimmed by haze to the farthest segment of peak-notched skyline. There was a diamond glitter on the lofty pinnacle of Forbes and the serrated line of its sister peaks along the continental divide, while near and far every mountain-side was streaked with the “down- ward smoke” of waterfalls, shimmering brocades of jeweled silk in the sunshine, flutters of wind-blown carded wool in the shadows. The Saskatchewan was out of its banks at the forks, spreading over the flats and encroaching upon the high mark of the spring floods. In the narrow gorge of the North Fork, where the water was up from twenty to twenty five feet in three days, what had been cascades and abrupt falls of six feet and more were completely wiped out by a solid white stretch of tumbling torrent. As long as the horses could find footings on the rocky lower slopes of the long massif of Mount Wil- son which bulwarks the North Fork to the east, we were able to avoid the spreading floods on the flats. [90] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD When talus and snow-slide débris finally presented unsurmountable barriers, there was no alternative but to push on up the valley along the inundated bottoms. Then it was we learned the meaning of real water trouble. Although successful in avoiding a com- plete ford of the main river, there were the endless networks of back channels to be passed, many of them deep and steep-banked. With the surging water practically opaque, there was no telling whether the next step was going to land a horse to his fetlocks or up to his mane. It was here that we paid the penalty for the false courage bred in the horses as a consequence of our little exhibition for the movie with the dummy packs. Up to that time nearly all of them had been extremely nervous about tackling a deep ford; afterwards they had altogether too much confidence. Like the ad- vocates of inland canal extension, theirs might have been the slogan, “The water way is the cheapest and best.” Let the road we had blazed for them be rocky, boggy, or blocked with dead-falls, and forth- with the three or four leading spirits among them would bolt toward supposed easier going in the near- est water, be it the boulder bed of a cascade or the cut-bank of a slough. Lor] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES After a few days we came to understand and to anticipate these outbreaks toward the new freedom; but that first morning on the North Fork of the Saskatchewan we were caught quite unprepared. Without the blink of an eye, Nelly, the sugar and salt horse, walked off a bank of glacial silt that was caving and receding before the attack of the grey- green torrent of the main river. Rolled over and whisked away in an instant, she came up with a blithe snort and started swimming straight for Hud- son’s Bay. What with the twelve-mile current and her pur- poseful pawing, she travelled at five times the speed at which we could force our horses through the brush and mud of the flooded flats, and was out of sight around the next bend before we were well started. Of course she had to strike bottom in time, but it was only by the rarest of luck that the intercepting gravel bar, a quarter of a mile below, chanced to run out from our side of the river. Even here the perverse filly was in two minds about rejoining us, stoutly declining to move a step shoreward until La Casse waded out to bring her back. All the sugar and salt salvaged from this later and longer baptism was in the shape of the dirty brown chunks which resulted from the reduction by ax of [92] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD the indurated slabs left after the containing sacks had been dried all night by the fire. Several other packs were badly soaked as a con- sequence of plunges into deep water, nearly all of which appeared to be due to the new-born mania of the horses to cure their trail troubles by hydropathic treatment. The radio was the worst casualty, undergoing a complete submergence when the horse carrying it stepped off into the river and was carried down un- der the horizontal trunks of several undermined pine trees before he found a place to climb out. As the radio, due to previous disintegrative bang- ings and bumpings, was already rated a total loss, we were less concerned over its wetting than about that of the sugar and salt. It was now inevitable that even the miserable remnants of the latter must be ex- hausted weeks before replenishment would be pos- sible. What could hardly have been other than a disas- trous attempt to ford the main river was avoided by a rough and precarious climb over a jutting headland, where two or three men to a horse were necessary at one point to keep the animals from sliding back to the valley. We pitched camp oppo- site the Alexandra late in the afternoon, having [93] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES made about eight miles. Several of the horses were so played out as to be unable to stand until their packs were removed. The human element of the party was holding up fairly well physically, but the mental atmosphere of the camp was well reflected in a note which “Soapy” wrote, to be left on a forked stick for his partner who was expected to follow later with a hunting party. Slightly expurgated, this missive concluded as fol- lows: “If you need any sugar or salt, dip it out of the Saskatch. Nine-tenths of ours is already in the drink and the rest most likely goes to-morrow. If you see any horseshoes floating down stream, look under them for my cayuses. Deep water navigation by pack-train ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.” The main North Fork and the Alexandra must be about equal in average volume. The former con- tinues north for some miles before bending to the west to its source under the Saskatchewan Glacier, itself a tentacle of the Columbia Icefield. The Al- exandra flows directly from the west, deriving its waters about equally from the Mount Lyell Icefield and that of the Columbia. Alexandra Glacier, lead- ing up to the continental divide under the peak of the [94] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD same name, was partly visible from our camp on the North Fork, but although little over eight miles dis- tant, we were to be two days in reaching it. The camp at the junction of the Alexandra and North Fork bears the gruesome but not unfitting name of ‘““[he Graveyard.” It is located at the focus of a four-way convergence of important mountain routes. ‘hat to the south—the one by which we had come—leads by the North Fork, Mistaya and Bow to Lake Louise. That up the North Fork leads finally to Jasper by alternative trails over Nigel or Wilcox Passes. What is for considerable distances -hardly more than a blazed trail to-day follows the route of the projected Banff to Jasper highway, which, when constructed, will be one of the finest scenic roads that can ever be built anywhere in the world. The westward route—it could hardly fairly be called a trail—from ‘““The Graveyard” runs up the valley of the Alexandra to the Castleguard branch of the river, to come to a blind end against the Saskatchewan Glacier tentacles of the Columbia Icefield. This was the way we planned to follow as far as it went, and then endeavor to go directly across the icefield on a short-cut to the head of the Sunwapta and the Arctic slope of the divide. [95] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES The easterly trail from “The Graveyard” winds over the mountain ridge to Pinto Lake and a junction with the trail leading down the Cline to the lower Saskatchewan and on to Banff. This latter trail, Winter snows permitting, was to be a part of our return route to the south. Due to its strategic location, the camp at the mouth of the Alexandra had been a hunting rendezvous for many years, first for the Indians and later for the farthest-faring of the parties from Banff or Jasper. Skinning game and discarding unsatisfactory spec- imens resulted in the accumulation of many bones and heads, and these grisly heaps of unwanted tro- phies of the chase give point to the name of “Graveyard.” Unsuccessful hunters are occasionally charged with having salvaged from “The Graveyard’s” va- ried stock of discards the trophies denied to their err- ing rifles. I have seen worse heads proudly dis- played in trophy-rooms than some of the specimens thrown away to bleach on the flood-scarred flats of the North Fork of the Saskatchewan. Another humid night, followed by a clear, hot morning, brought still higher water. La Casse, in- deed, was inclined to believe that both North Fork and Alexandra were at higher stages than when he [96] NVM@HOLVASVS AHL AO TANNWVHO ddad ATGALOAdXANN NV ONIYSALNGA LSAL NIVUL WOVd uUpnuaarg “YN “TJ €q o0yd VASVEAVHLVY WOW VIANN'TIOO “LW ANY (L4aT) SNIML HLAOS GNV HLYON unuiaar gy “3T “TJ &qQ 0,04 g BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD had gone over the same route the previous year when the spring thaw was culminating and the rivers were near the crest of the June rise. Further damage to provisions was inevitable in the deep, swift fords ahead, but this prospective loss was far less serious than the threat to the considerable part of Harmon’s photographic supplies, for which no water-tight con- tainers had been provided. In all of the veteran’s twenty years of pack-train travel in the Rockies he had never found it necessary to take special precau- tions to protect his photographic supplies from water. Now the lack of such protection threatened seriously to jeopardize the success of the expedition. With the movie films and my own roll-films in cans, the principal concern was over the hundred or more packets of Harmon’s special film-pack and the large motion-picture machine. The compact little “Sept” movie camera, with its sixteen feet of film which ran through at the release of a spring, rode with Harmon on his horse to be ready for emergency shots. Most of our “still” cameras were also carried where they could be given a certain amount of personal attention in case of trouble. The best we could do for the threatened camera and supplies was to give their respective pack-boxes extra wrappings of canvas before pushing on to L97] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES breast the flood that was sweeping down the valley of the Alexandra. Provisions and bedding would have to take their chances. We crossed the score of scattering channels of the North Fork without trouble. The declivity of the valley had increased rapidly within the last two miles, so that the swift-flowing water carried all of the light glacial silt down to deposit it in the opener reaches above the box canyon where we had photo- graphed the bears. This made for many broad, shallow channels with hard, rocky bottoms, quite simple and safe to ford. At the mouth of the Alexandra conditions quite the reverse were encountered. Here the floods had risen to cover the low flats in one unbroken lake, with little to indicate the course of the deep, per- — pendicular-banked, meandering channels by which it was traversed. After bogging the horses re- peatedly in attempting to work along the base of the slope where the waters of the lake lapped the mountain-side, “Soapy” decided to try to avoid the flooded area entirely by taking the pack-train up through the timber. This led us into quite the roughest and most punishing going we had yet faced. With a rocky, broken slope of all of forty degrees to traverse, progress would have been quite difficult [98] | BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD enough without any additional natural obstacles. It was the timber which finally took the heart out of us, man and horse. ‘This had been burned in patches. The trees: of the unburned stretches stood thickly enough to hang up a pack now and then but still permitted a slow but fairly steady advance. The passage of the tongues of charred slope where the fires had swept presented a far more serious problem. With the bristling young growth standing thick as the spines on the back of a ruffled porcupine, there was really only one safe and satisfactory way of tak- ing the pack-train through it. That was to cut out a swath with an ax. This was slow—especially where the dead-falls laid their trickiest traps under- foot—but it was also sure. If the horses had been content to wait and let us turn to and systematically clear a way ahead for them, things would not have been so bad. It might have taken the whole day to do it, but we would ultimately have brought them through to the solider flats above the overflow lake without further boggings. Un- fortunately, however, action had already become too hectic to make a cool, deliberate analysis of the sit- uation possible on the part of either horses or packers. With pack-covers and tempers—both human and equine—torn to tatters at the end of the first hundred L99] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES yards of arboreal tunneling, men and horses said and did things to each other which effectually precluded further peaceful and dispassionate consideration of the situation. The decision in such arguments as were indulged in went mostly to ‘“Wolverine” and the two or three other Indian cayuses which drove home their points with steel-shod hoofs. Even a packer hasn’t much to say to that kind of repartee, especially when the horse makes his point first. ‘Soapy” voiced his protests in two languages and twice as many Indian dialects—until Nelly, the salt and sugar-dissolver, with her forelegs clasped in the embrace of a pair of locked dead-falls, lashed out with her hind hoofs and planted a love-tap a few inches below the nerve centers of the old woodsman’s diaphragm. ‘“‘Soapy” was quiet for some minutes after that caress, doubtless musing on the ingratitude of a colt which he had raised on a bottle after its mother had been lost in an ice-choked ford of the lower Saskatchewan four years previously. None of the rest of us had to endure the mental anguish of being kicked by his own bottle-baby, but that didn’t reduce by a whit the physical discomfort of having a horseshoe clapped over one’s ear just as he was bending to disentangle the lash-rope of a scat- tered pack. And we used to think it was lucky to [ 100] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD find a horseshoe! Doubtless it all depends upon how and where you find it. I can only testify that as an ear-muff the luck attaching to a horseshoe is of a distinctly negative character. It was a number of little incidents of the kind indicated which made difficult, and finally impos- sible, the co-operation between horse and man imper- ative for the overcoming of the almost prohibitive obstacles incident to taking the pack-train any great distance along that steeply-sloping, heavily timbered mountain side. Sixteen horses starring in as many different directions, with only five men to follow them, did not make for linear progress, and the difficulty of rounding them up was considerably hampered by the fact almost every wake was strewn with fragments of broken packs. ‘Things like the contents of smashed grub-boxes and a snag-ripped sack of rolled oats take a lot of salvaging in soggy foot-deep moss and fallen timber. Constantly reslinging packs and dragging fugitive horses back into line, we had made scarcely more than a mile by early afternoon. To reach the near- est practicable camping ground before dark, there- fore, left no other alternative than to drop back to the flooded flats and see what could be done in floundering across them. [ror] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES There was still an unbroken sheet of water stretch- ing from wall to wall of the valley where we came out of the timber into the open again, but “Soapy,” shouting optimistically that the lake was much shallower than below, plunged boldly in to show the pack-train how the thing should be done. Possibly he was correct as to the soundings of an average cross-section right across the valley, but I have serious doubts if there was a profounder pool in all of the Alexandra than that into which our doughty old leader pushed his lithe-limbed thoroughbred at the initial plunge. Horse and man disappeared completely from sight and it was all of two or three seconds before anything but bubbles and swirls marked the point of engulfment. From the fact that mount preceded rider back into the sunlight, I assumed that the hole had been deep enough to allow both of them to roll over at least once without flicking spur or horseshoe above the surface. The main surge of the river ap- peared to have undermined the root-bound bank to a depth of ten or fifteen feet, and “Soapy” and his horse, under the impulse of their rush from above, had dived most of the way to the bottom. A horse is a very buoyant animal. On very few occasions have I seen one completely submerged for so long. [ 102 | BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD “Soapy’s” Rooseveltian touch had gone with his glasses, but, with two inches additional droop to the sherifhan moustachios, he was more than ever the tusked bull walrus. There was little of the basso profundo roar of the walrus, however, in the throaty croak with which he accompanied the pantomime intended to convey to us that, along with a lot of glacial water and mud, he had swallowed his “dining-room set.” When Rob explained that “dining-room set” was ‘“Soapy’s” facetious euphemism for his false-teeth, Harmon and I choked back our ill-timed mirth and began forthwith applying vigorous first-aid in the form of lusty slaps on the sufferer’s buckskin-shirted back. Fortunately, only the mud and water had taken a through passage. The teeth, hung up some- where in the upper reaches of “‘Soapy’s” cesophagus, finally were dislodged by the coughing induced by the slaps and gradually jiggered along back to where _ they belonged. Two horses which had plunged in after the leader swam on to a firm footing on the flats, but only after both of their packs had been doused completely un- der. As continuing on this course this would have meant more damaged provisions, to say nothing of the risk to cameras and photographic supplies, we [103 ] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES decided to try to skirt the margin of the overflow for a few hundred yards farther. This was accom- panied by several more deep and troublesome bog- gings, but we continued to wallow along toward a point at which it appeared practicable finally to begin wading the flats. The last fifty yards was over a sharply sloping shelf of broken limestone, which was slippery with moss and streaked with seepage from the mountain- side. Horse after horse lost its footing in the helter- skelter scramble across, but none of the first dozen went sufficiently out of control to do a tail-spin or nose-dive. When my own turn came the exercise of ordinary common-sense would have warned me that the proper thing to do was to dismount and give my horse a fairer chance by leading him over the most treacherous part of the slippery ledge. The animal which I was riding temporarily in place of the sure- footed “La Belle,” who was still too sore from her snagging to carry a saddle, was one of those secured at Lake Louise to replace the two strays of the orig- inal pack-train. He was a powerful and willing brute but handicapped by a splay hoof and a terp- sichorean temperament that inclined him to spells of [104] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD toe-dancing at highly inopportune places and oc- casions. It was the bad hoof which started the trouble at the sloping shelf. When “Le Diable’s” fore feet commenced slipping he tried to remedy the difficulty by rearing them high in the air and walking on his hind ones. As one of the latter carried the deformed hoof, stability, far from being improved, became a deal more precarious. In fact, “Le Diable,” after a clattering spell of buck-and-winging with his steel- shod hoofs striking sparks from the rock, started to topple over backward. I kicked free of the stirrups as I felt him going and, more by luck than calculated intent, struck on my back on the upper side of the shelf. The impact jolted me all the way up the spine, but this was of small moment in view of my good fortune in landing in a niche which prevented my jarred anatomy from sliding down to interfere with the highly intricate pas seul by which “Le Diable” was expressing his elation over the fact that he had ridded himself of a rider without losing his own balance. His triumph was short lived. When the splay hoof skidded on a patch of dewy moss “Le Diable,” like Lucifer, came out of the skies with a bang. [105 ] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Caroming from the ledge against a jack-pine, he was flung back to the rock again, this time with all four hoofs pawing the air. And it was in this ignomin- ious posture that the prideful devil-dancer of a mo- ment before slid down to and stuck fast in the morass of mud and burned timber at the edge of the over- flow. A bit dazed from the jolt, I was still able to scram- ble to my feet and lend a hand to the packers in extricating my mount from his difficulties. A sore spot between the shoulder blades, where the box of my camera had interposed to break an otherwise even contact with the face of the ledge, was my only sou- venir of the occasion. ‘‘Le Diable” had gone farther and fared considerably worse. Sizable patches of hair and hide were replaced by raw abrasion at sev- eral exposed points, while the slide down the rock with the saddle beneath him appeared to have strained his powerful back. By good fortune oppor- tunity offered to replace him with a more dependable animal before the really serious work of the trip be- gan at the Columbia Icefleld. At a point near the head of the overflow lake we were finally able to venture out onto the flats without great risk of wetting the packs except as a conse- quence of untoward accident. For a mile we [ 106 ] .BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD splashed along through gradually shallowing water, finally to come out upon a stretch of muddy but unsubmerged meadows cut with many meandering channels of the river. Depth of water rather swift- ness was the menace here, but, by exploring carefully in advance with the saddle animals, serious trouble with the packs was avoided. Although we were little troubled with deep bog- ging of the horses after the increasing slope of the valley floor brought better drainage of the stretches subject to inundation, progress was still terribly tiring upon the heavily overloaded animals. Even the sol- idest of the glacial silt tended to form a vacuum cup under each hoof, the breaking of the suction of which demanded a physical effort probably greater than that of climbing a steep trail. For the first time since our departure the horses became so exhausted as to try lying down with their loads. As this al- ways slacked the lash-ropes, it usually proved easier to throw off the packs entirely before dragging the wearied animals again to their feet. And, that, of course, meant five or ten minutes delay for the whole train for every reslinging of a hitch. With no possible camping ground offered either by the steep mountain sides or the muddy flats, there was nothing to do but keep pushing on to where the rough, [107] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES sharply-sloping boulder-fan from a torrent draining a glacier to the south poured down to the Alexandra. It was a sodden, ding-dong struggle to the last foot, and the mauve shadows of coming night were bank- ing thickly below the wall of the imminent continen- tal divide before the last of the straggling horses scrambled up out of the mud to a solid footing of shale and gravel. There was no grass and little protection from the wind on the forbidding triangle of torrent-strewn rocks eroded from the southern valley wall, but with no other possible halting place available it was up to us to make the best of what we had. Fairly good forage was provided by swimming the unpacked horses across a back-channel of the river and turning them loose on the half-submerged flats beyond. Tepee- and tent-poles were found after extended and exhausting cruising of the scantily-timbered mountain-side. With no evidences of anyone ever having camped at this point before, “Soapy,” his interest in the lighter and finer things of life reviving as La Casse began to spread the supper dishes, announced that it was in order for us to give the site a name. Even the fumes of steaming coffee and frying ham could not quite obliterate the memories of that accursed [108] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD day of bangings and wallowings, and that, of course, made it impossible for us to take up the matter impartially and without passion. Of the several names proposed, only the one advanced by the gentle Harmon was entirely fit to print, and even that was not quite polite. It is wisely provided by the American and Cana- dian Goverments that official geographical nomen- clature shall be vested in boards sitting far away and long after the event of discovery. If the names applied to muddy rivers by the pioneers were per- petuated, the impression might well be fostered that every stream in question was a tributary of the Styx. Fording a side channel and crossing half a mile of overflowed flats after breaking camp the next morning, we skirted another delta of gravel to come out upon a stretch of valley of greatly increased declivity. The river was swifter and narrower here, with broad, hard gravel bars between the winding channels. It was really much less exhausting going than that of the previous day, but the horses, weak from overwork and underfeeding, had much trouble at the ever recurring fords. At the end of two miles all of them were straggling badly, with several per- sisting in lying down with their packs. It was at this untimely junction that there opened [109] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES up a magnificent vista of valley, closed at the far end by the sun-sparkling serracs of Alexandria Glacier running back to the snowy summit of the peak of the same name at the crest of the continental divide. The setting was an incomparable one for the series of fording shots which Harmon had been postponing until he found just the place he wanted for them. It would not have been so bad had the lay-out of the scenery been such as to permit of the crossings being made at the most favourable points in the reg- ular way. These were hard enough for the jaded horses at the best; when exigencies of lighting back- ground made it necessary for them to be put in and driven through at bends where deep, swift channels running under steep, abrupt cut-banks rendered it difficult to scramble out, the temptation to challenge the right of the movie to interfere with the regular routine of trail-work must have been a serious one for “Soapy” to withstand. Not a little worried for the last two days over the way in which the abnormally severe work was wear- ing down his horses before the trip was well started, it must have struck the old woodsman as a bit hard to have additional effort of the most arduous kind demanded of animals already near exhaustion. Harmon had faced the same sort of problem many [110] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD times in previous seasons, and, therefore, had had the foresight to explain it to the packers in advance. Thus forewarned, old “Soapy” gamely came through with the active and hearty codperation without which the desired shots could not have been made. This made it not any the less trying to have to see all- but-collapsed horses rolled against a log-jam and forced to do an extra hundred yards of swimming and floundering just below a broad, open, hard- bottomed ford. The horses carrying the cameras and photographic supplies were headed over at the safest crossings. The packs of most of the other animals came in for thorough soakings. ‘Two or three bed-rolls took in water, as did also the dried fruit and dehydrated vegetables. More brine and syrup streamed down the river from the salt and sugar sacks. All of which was of very little moment, however, when weighed against Harmon’s triumphant announcement that “the back-lighting across Alexandra shot like a mil- lion dollars.” - One of the longest and hardest fords of the day furnished an interesting and not altogether explicable instance of canine psychology. ‘The pack-train made the crossing without getting into serious difficulty but the hard, partly up-stream swim in swift, broken Ree, ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES water was almost too much for the dogs. The powerfully muscled “Buster” made it at his first at- tempt, but only by a hair. “Tip” failed by a good flve feet. Carried down a hundred yards and back to the side from which he had started, the little Indian mongrel promptly galloped up the bank and put in again at the exact point at which he had made his first start. Failure this time was by a wider margin. Twice more he repeated the attempt, each time with a wider chute of swirling water separating the point at which he began to lose ground from the striven-for bank. With tottering legs and lolling tongue, the game little beast dragged his tired body back out of the icy waters after his fourth failure. His strength was plainly nearly gone, but something inside of the funny flat-topped head was only beginning to come into action. It could not have been reason, for “Tip” had been too busy keeping his head above water to have time for any real thinking even had he been capable of it. Instinct, perhaps, is the more convenient word; but even that somewhat inclusive term does not quite satisfy. At any rate, without an instant’s pause—and just as I had resigned myself to recrossing and bringing Bees AATIVA GUVNOATISVO WOowd ‘(Ladd S6VI1) THAT “LW ung ‘uowsnyy uoskg fo ksajanoy) nal —e =" ea Se FONVLISIG AHL NI AGIAIG IVLINANILNOO FHL GNV YaIOVTIS VYANVXATV “"VUGNVXFIV FHL JO SLVIA AHL NO ‘ONIGUOA WOT GALSOVHXA ‘SASYOH WOVd ONILSAA BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD him back under my arm—“Tip” began loping up the bank again. Passing without pause or side- glance the point at which he had launched his four previous swims, he ran on a hundred yards to dis- appear in the timber of the mountain side beyond a bend. Recurrent flashes of brown fur between the trunks of the trees revealed him running on to where a gravelly beach marked the beginning of a ford so broad and shallow that half of it was passed by long bounds. Attribute it to “the unerring needle of animal in- stinct” if you will; but what, then, was that needle doing at the first four abortive swims? “Buster,” everything considered, impressed me as being quite the most intelligent animal of any kind I had ever had opportunity to study at close range. And “Tip” I have often thought of as one of the worst fools of a dog that ever came to my notice. Yet that confounded camp-robbing Indian mongrel revealed occasional flashes of intelligence, instinct, or what you will, which not only quite out-Bustered “Buster,” but even left the several human units of the party blinking blankly at each other with won- dering, uncomprehending eyes. One such instance occurred in connection with our discovery of the great spring feeding the cataract on Castleguard [113] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES River; another on the Athabaska Glacier. I will tell of both in their proper sequence. After making a total of not over four miles for the day, horses were unpacked and camp pitched at a beautiful and well-sheltered site a mile below the foot of the Alexandra Glacier. Several peaks of the lofty massif of Mount Lyell were visible to the south- ward, rising above a broken but very extensive ice- field. This great mer de glace, discovered by Dr. Hector of the Palisser Expedition in 1858, has a total area of nearly forty square miles. Until the dis- covery of the Columbia Icefield, forty years later, it was believed to be the largest in the Canadian Rockies. All five of the Lyell peaks are over 11,000 feet in height, while the summit of Forbes, a short distance to the south, attains an altitude of 11,902 feet. | Clambering over a low ridge with the movie outfit in search of a vantage from which to make a picture of the Alexandra Glacier, we stumbled upon a set of tepee-poles marking the site of a comparatively recent Indian camp. “Soapy” promptly announced that we were viewing the remains of an Indian’s “Honeymoon lodge,” going on to explain that it was purposely pitched at a distance from water in order [114] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD that the bride should have opportunity to show her quality as a worker at the outset. “Soapy,” opining that there was much to be said in favor of the Indian custom of not spoiling a bride by soft pampering, demanded point-blank my own views on the subject. I replied “Ugh!” this being as near as I could come in Cree to, ‘““That all depends upon the bride.” I can conceive of nothing less wise than committing’ oneself any further than that upon so delicate a subject, especially in print. Returning to camp just before dark, we found an- other outfit had arrived. It was that of Dr. Fowler, of New York, accompanied by his son and Dr. At- kins, of Banff. Bill Potts, “Soapy’s” partner, was head packer. With him as wrangler was an extra- ordinarily tall young American, aptly described by “Soapy” as being “as long as a lash-rope.” Dr. Fowler was a Canadian Rockies “pilgrim” of many years standing. He did no hunting or climb- ing but was very keen on color photography. He planned to follow our route to Castleguard Valley and the Columbia Icefield, back-tracking later to the North Fork of the Saskatchewan and going on to Jasper by the regular route over Nigel Pass. [115] ON THE ROOF OF THE ROCKIES Having long heard of Bill Potts as one of the doughtiest of the big-game hunters of the Rockies, the present opportunity to get him and old “Soapy” together, matching yarn for yarn, was too good to be missed. Seeing the shadows of the two famous woodsmen bobbing together against the roof of the Potts cook-tent, I hied over hot-foot, hopeful of hearing at first-hand Bill’s story of the time he had swum the swollen Brazeau with a grizzly cub in his mouth after braining its mother with an ax. A low mutter of conversation became audible as I approached, with a steady clickety-clicking obligato running through it. Lifting the flap of the tent, I was just in time to hear “Soapy” assure Bill that “Frog” La Casse had “the darndest slickest receep” for a frosting for writing letters on “choklit cake” that anyone had ever heard tell of. And the clickety-clicking was from two hard-plied pairs of knitting-needles! When “Soapy” resumed the rhasphody interrupted by my entrance, it was to offer to trade Potts ‘““The Frog’s” frosting “receep” in return for instruction in the esoteric intricacies of the new “hook-stitch.” Those two hard-boiled, hard-bitten old bear-killers had actually settled down to spend the evening knit- ting bedroom slippers and swapping cooking recipes! [116] BUCKING MUD AND FLOOD Potts explained to me about the knitting presently. He had taken to it to kill time during a dreary two years in a German prison-camp, subsequently passing on the accomplishment to “Soapy” while they hiber- nated through the long winters at their Morley ranch. But I never did get the proper version of that cub- in-the-mouth swimming episode. [7] CHAPTER VI IN CAMP AT CASTLEGUARD THE night of August 28th, spent in the camp be- low Alexandra Glacier, brought a distinct change of weather. There had been no rain or snow for a week, the first part of that period having been warm and humid, the rest hot and clear. Now it had turned sharp and cold, with a lowering pall of grey clouds threatening a heavy storm. The promised diversion was a welcome one, pro- vided only that it did not last too long. Forest fires are smouldering all through the summer in the Cana- dian Rockies, never being more than partially quenched by the rains. This means that a few days of weather without moisture in one form or another inevitably results in that bane of the scenic photogra- pher—smoke. Only the smoke-clouds from a near-by fire, or the dense blanket of a general conflagration, seriously interfere with close-range work, like trail-and camp-shots. But for strictly scenic work, where fifty miles of air may intervene between the camera and a line of peaks which must have a diamond-clear sky- [118] IN CAMP AT CASTLEGUARD line to shoot successfully, the barely perceptible haziness due to fires five hundred miles or more away makes photographic effort quite futile. The low but steadily rising and thickening bank of murkiness we had noticed beyond the continental divide for two or three days was caused, as we learned later from the papers, by forest-fires along the Pacific Coast of British Columbia. Harmon was already worrying about it, saying that westerly mountain shots from Castleguard and the Columbia Icefield would be quite out of the question until there was a clearing of the air in that direction.